Jeff Kelly: Imagine then my shock while in 1999 touring their home, now a museum, and seeing an actual lock of Emily’s hair!

 Jeff Kelly's Brontëiteness confession. 

Like many before me, I became obsessed with the Brontës, especially Emily, who became, truly, an infatuation.   As I read Wuthering Heights, I found myself thinking of what she may have been thinking while she wrote down the lines.  What she was wearing while she wrote them down.  I imagined her in her small room, writing her musical poems as the night wind “waved her hair.”
I learned that Charlotte later edited her manuscript poems for publication, which I found extremely annoying; how could one hope to go in and “fix” such beautiful language?  (In setting her poems, I have only ever used the original manuscript versions.)
I wondered what she looked like in real life, when she smiled or cried.  How her skin smelled, her hair felt.  I wanted to get in a time machine and go back there.  I imagined what it might have been like, walking along a dirt road and suddenly coming upon Emily and Charlotte, two anonymous girls in their little carriage, on a day trip to Leeds.
The strange thing is, I slowly started to realize that there were thousands of others just like me.  Obsessed.
Imagine then my shock while in 1999 touring their home, now a museum, and seeing an actual lock of Emily’s hair!  (It had been cut off to save, in the tradition of the time, shortly after her death.)
I kept going back to that room, that glass case and looking again and again.  She was real, not some mythical thing I had dreamed up.  I was hesitant to finally leave. bronteblog/beneath-far-gondals-foreign-sky

I wash searching on the internet to find a photograph of the hair of Emily Bronte, but I could'nt. 

I found  Emily Brontë's burnt comb, said to have been used just before she died of consumption on December 19 1848. 

And I found a sample of Mrs. Maria Brontë's hair (dated 1824). 

culture24.uk/history