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Dr Andrew Wilson takes a closer look...

Visitors to the exhibition 'Who were the Brontës?' are invited to arrive at their own conclusions about fact and fiction in the family story, helped by a display of objects, drawings, letters and other mementoes.

New research by the Department of Archaeological Science at the University of Bradford has recently thrown new light on part of that story. Archaeological scientist Dr Andrew Wilson was originally contacted by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in connection with some work for last year's Brontë in Abstract exhibition featuring Turner Prize nominated artist Cornelia Parker. He says: "The initial focus was the artistic side of things using a scanning electron microscope as an artistic tool to see the Brontë memorabilia in a new light. We made use of this very modern piece of instrumentation which allows us to look at objects at high resolution and high magnification without destroying them. We've gots lots of nice black and white images from various artefacts.

Up close: Anne Bronte's hair...

"A lot of those artefacts we know are bits of the Brontës themselves, mourning jewellery and other hair items. We're not grave robbing. These are fairly well-documented items in the collection although we can never be really sure with items that have been around longer than the collections themselves. Some items documented as coming from later in their lives were collected by members of the Brontë household, staff and friends but there are also some samples from earlier in their lives.

"In addition to the imaging work we were asked to shed a little more light on the Brontës themselves and again we used quite a high specification analytical technique which may seem a bit drastic. We actually take a single fibre because it actually encapsulates so much information. We know that hair on average grows about a centimetre each month and each centimetre, as it grows, locks up a bit of information about ourselves, what we've been eating and how our diet may change.

"Essentially we may think, 'We are what we eat,' soÌýeach centimetre is going to reflect the changing seasons in a population which lived before our modern supermarket diet. Here we are looking at individuals from the 19th century, and how their diet varied on a monthly basis, and we can see seasonal patterns in dietary change. We've only been able to do that in a few of the samples. They are not all long enough to look at in such a detailed way. With all the samples we've done what we call bulk measurements - we've looked at the average diet dependent on the length of the fibre and we've contrasted that with public data on a population group from London from about the same time. This is from the site at Christ Church Spitalfields, an area which included immigrants. We are talking about second and third generation French Hugenots living in inner-city conditions being contrasted with the rural location of Haworth.

"The obvious thing to point out is that conditions in Haworth today are very pleasant but obviously disease meant that life spans were not as long as in the past and it is often assumed that people then were not leading a healthy lifestyle or eating a healthy diet. What we can say for sure with the Brontë samples is that there's a balance of protein input, some meats and dairy products as well as the vegetable component. That contrasts with some of the myths grown out of folklore suggesting that Patrick Brontë perhaps restricted the diets of the Brontë family. Although their lives were cut short the information we have which embodies months and years as a snapshot of information (not necessarily all relating to their final years) suggests a balanced diet as far as we can see."

In the Isotope Lab...

Andrew warns that research like this will never tell us as much as we'd like to know: "We're never going to be to say, 'Yes, they all ate fish and chips on a Friday' but we can certainly get a better handle on how much protein input there was to their diet. One of the things we have to be wary of is that physiological stress, things like major illness if it's chronic enough and major life events such as carrying and weaning a child, do have a physical impact on the body. There are things we are never going to know but, if we put it into context, it's an interesting and valid piece of work."

Could such research be used to answer one question that's intrigued Brontë fans over the years? Andrew doesn't have to wait to hear the question: "Can we tell whether Charlotte was pregnant when she died? We can't be certain that the sample we've had of Charlotte's hair from later life relates to those final months and we'd need to have hair that was cut right at the root end to ensure that we got that window of time. There are things we are never going to get to the bottom of."

Andrew sums up his Brontë findings: "There's a significant protein input in the diet. They are not just subsisting on meagre potatoes, and when we put it in the context of published work on the London site we've got information that suggests their diet is a bit more balanced than that [particular] urban population from the same time period."

When making sense of such data it helps that the Brontë sisters were famous in their own lifetime so locks of their hair would have been seen as valuable keepsakes. Andrew says: "We've looked in the past at samples attributed to Sir Isaac Newton and one of the major problems we had was establishing whether they were authentic or not…In the end it turned out we were looking at four different individuals. You can see that where things have a very long and unknown history these questions have to be asked."

On show: Mrs Brontes' hair.

It's not just about the sisters. Andrew has also been working with samples from Patrick and Mrs Brontë as well as brother Branwell who is often credited with having something of a sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll lifestyle. Andrew points out that searching for drugs and other toxicological information would require quite a bit more hair and would therefore be a destructive process.

So was Branwell little more than a drunkard and a drug addict? The exhibition shows that his poetry was admired during his lifetime and when he went to work on the railways he was quickly promoted. And certainly the Bradford University research suggests that Patrick was not an unkind father who deprived his family of food.

Emma King, who has put the new exhibition together, believes that many of these perceptions of the family come from the thousands of films, books and plays that have appeared over the years: "The popular story says that the Brontës lived a remote, rural life.ÌýIt describes three sisters who lived in poverty with a distant father and unfriendly aunt.ÌýTheir brother drank away the family money, forcing them to work. Yet before their tragic, early deaths they each wrote novels that would become famous around the world – the story is an attractive one, but not entirely true.ÌýThis exhibition hopes to challenge some of these perceptions."

Who Were the Brontës is at the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth until April 2009.