TWO OF MY SISTERS and I used to play “Being the Brontë Sisters” in our early teens; not because we were particularly literary – Cabby’s favourite book was The SAS Survival Handbook — but because we, too, were three female siblings who were quite ugly and couldn’t get laid to save our lives, and that demograph tends not to have many prominent role models.

Cabby and I would always insist that Claire, who was the youngest, had to be Emily Brontë, as we considered Emily a bit hysterical and mad, and Claire would always respond by being a bit hysterical and mad about it, which we thought proved our point. It was then left for me and Cabby to fight over being Charlotte, as no one wants to be Anne. She was very much the Denise Nolan of the line-up. The Rev Patrick Brontë must have had to be very diplomatic about her achievements in the Christmas round-robin: “Charlotte has written one of the great novels of the 19th century, and Emily one of the great hysterical and mad novels of the 19th century. Anne, meanwhile, has produced great quantities of delicious damson jam. And Agnes Grey.” Cabby, whose sole contribution to the book section of our short-lived arts magazine, The Fist of Righteousness, was “Ken Hom’s Chinese Cookery is crap — never buy it”, did generally regard books as something with which to smite our brother Eddie. But Claire and I, who were both extraordinarily deep — a deepness often only expressible by sitting in the front room with the curtains drawn, playing funereal chords very slowly on a Casio keyboard and weeping — generally read a book a day.

More often than not, Claire’s “book a day” would be Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. Between 1990 and 1996, Claire had a fairly unbroken run of Caroline Helstone Relationships, ie, fixations on distant, uninterested men that went on for years, and the unreciprocated nature of which left her weak, emaciated and close to death. Or, the Moran metabolism and unhappiness-relieving routines being what they were, she was left pale and bloated from leaving the impression of her face on a two-kilo block of cheese at three in the morning. Shirley was a great comfort to her. When a youth she knew only as “the Sisters of Mercy fan” openly ran away from her at the nightclub in the Dorchester hotel — and, later on the same dark evening, witnessed her ignominiously vomiting into her own shoes — Claire spent the morning after in the bath with nothing but Shirley and a pack of Lambert & Butler.

And on the fateful day that his replacement, Moley, took Fat Lisa up to Wenlock Edge in his car and felt her up on the anniversary of his and Claire’s first feeling-up, her agony could be stilled only by Caroline Helstone’s soliloquy about slighted love that begins: “You held out your hand for an egg, and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation: close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind: in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered with the torture, the squeezed scorpion will die, and you will have learned the great lesson how to endure without a sob.”

We would often, in our shared room, get this speech at 2am, ending with Claire’s shriek of, “Where’s my egg? Where’s my piece of the Moley pie? On Wenlock Edge with his hands up Fat Lisa’s bra, that’s where!”

I, on the other hand, was a Jane Eyre girl. While Claire was at least going out and having catastrophic fixations on real people, I never left the house at all, having reached such a cheese-aided size that the only outfit that fitted me was a poncho and a wrap-around skirt made of, with cheeseparing irony, cheesecloth. Even with my limited knowledge of the modes of young people in 1990, I felt that this was not the outfit that, on my entrance to the Dorchester, would see me borne to the dancefloor on the hands of the ten best-looking Darrens in the room.

So I stayed at home, did a great deal of housework in the hopes that it would make me lose weight, loved Alan Alda in M*A*S*H like a husband, and re-read Jane Eyre every month, because it was, when you read between the lines, a book about being very fat and doing housework to lose weight, and loving Alan Alda from M*A*S*H like a husband — but all with a great many nicer hats than I had access to at the time. I was comforted by the fact that Mr Rochester/Alan Alda appeared to have to go blind before he could marry me/Jane. It would make the issue of the poncho that much easier when the time came.

I suspect the reason that Claire and I, along with millions of teenage girls, have loved Charlotte’s novels so much is because they are about waiting. Waiting and suffering. And if there is a better summation of what it is to be a defective, hysterical teenager hoping to grow into a better, calmer adult, I’ve yet to come across it. Caroline Helstone waiting until Robert Moore gets ill enough to crave a boring girl, Shirley Keeldar waiting until Louis Moore “gets up” his “gumption”, “plain” Jane Eyre having to wait until the first Mrs Rochester gets burned to death — every story comforts you that, if you just patiently sit out the next 600 pages of your life, you will eventually end up with the right taciturn Yorkshireman in your back parlour. You won’t even need to set fire to Thornfield yourself. A handy madwoman will do it. What could be more appealing?

Of course, it’s only a particularly morbid, essentially lazy teenage girl who will love the idea of waiting and suffering so much. My sister Cabby, it should be noted, simply stopped eating cheese and started talking to boys about SAS survival tactics and how crap Ken Hom was, and never spent a day after her 15th birthday single. On the long afternoons we were locked out of our bedroom because she had a boy in there, Claire and I would sit on the landing, with Shirley and Jane Eyre, passing around a lump of Wensleydale like a cheroot, waiting.

Explore Books

• Book Extracts

• Book Reviews

• Books Group

• Audio Books

Times Recommends

• The 100 Best Books of the Decade
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• The conversation: James Ellroy