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Aloof, enigmatic and utterly unmoved by the 20th-century’s insatiable demands for TV appearances, interviews and signing tours, they have eschewed the vulgarity of publicity. Until now.
In partnership with this year’s Ilkley Literature Festival and after months of painstaking negotiation with this newspaper, the two elder sisters have abandoned seclusion to speak publicly for the first time. What can possibly have occasioned this breach in their water-tight security? The collapse of the Berlin Wall? Tony Blair’s new dawn? The Orange prize?”It’s Cliff really, isn’t it.” Charlotte, the taller of the two, sheathed in pale pink topped off with a cream bonnet framing her grave face, is strikingly direct. Television and film companies fall over themselves to adapt them for the screen and the Bronte Parsonage Museum is a mecca for tourists hungry to gobble up English literature in the shape of Bronte biscuits and the like. Students across the English-speaking world discuss their books and academics gain tenures writing biographies and theses about their little-known lives During all this time, the sisters have remained silent. No one, not even the Mitfords, or sisters AS Byatt and Margaret Drabble, can claim to rival this uniquely successful family hive of literary industry

Industry is the word.

Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights have never been out of print. “I’ve never heard of anyone putting on their CV, `I was born without pain relief,’ ” I told the voice. To which, I am happy to relate, she had no reply.Rosie Millard is the BBC’s arts correspondent.. Exactly 150 years ago, three daughters of a curate living together in the isolated Yorkshire village of Haworth found publishers for their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey. Just in case I have to admit to it after the event.Anyway, I retorted to my cold-caller, it doesn’t matter. Labour is one thing, but surely having a healthy baby at the end of it all is the important issue. But it seems as if any medical advances in obstetrics are now spurned by right-thinking non-medical women marching under an anti- interventionist banner.

And although it’s easy enough to say you can shrug it off, the pervasiveness of the anti-pain relief lobby is such that it has left me with a sneaking dread of having to have anything at all. Having a “natural” delivery has become a sort of postnatal brownie point in martyrdom.But why? My mother (who had four of us) says if they had been around in her day, she’d have gone for the option like a shot. But then she’s a doctor.Of course, it’s good to be informed, and have the option to make choices; and, even better, that much of the “empowerment” (maternity buzz-word) surrounding childbirth has been handed back to midwives and the mothers themselves. But I have discovered that those who chose to go it alone tend to expiate their hours of agony in the delivery suite by climbing up on to a pedestal and making everyone else feel completely lily-livered afterwards. I was at a festival launch the other day and one Bob Geldof (whom I have never met before) came up, inquired as to the due date and gave me a thumbs-up.But the epidural thing has become a real issue. People who have had a ghastly time in labour swear by them – people who have had a happy time in labour (well, sort of) also say they’re good news.