I AM ALWAYS A LITTLE BIT SURPRISED to be eating Brontë biscuits on the train to Leeds; Shakespeare sponge fingers have not yet materialised in the shops of Stratford- upon-Avon, but perhaps it is only a matter of time, and “materialise” is the right word.

This is not a column about the iniquities of decorating tea towels and tea pots with our literary heritage, or even the redomestication of female geniuses by turning them into a biscuit.

No, today we discover how art meets arcana, not far from the popular 19th-century practice of mediums and ouija boards that began with Browning and went on with Yeats and his psychic guru, Madame Blavatsky.

The Brontë Parsonage in Haworth opens a new exhibition this weekend featuring a cross-media installation by Cornelia Parker, the Turner prize-shortlisted artist.

As part of filming for the installation, entitled Brontëan Abstracts, she invited the psychic Henri Llewelyn Davies to pick up the various vibes and visitations going on in England’s most famous — and freezing — rectory. (I am allowed to complain about the North because I was born there — and, like the Brontës, I discovered that the best way to keep your fingers warm is either to play an instrument or to write a book.) Anyway, Henri took a medium with her, and the pair voiced a few sullen servants still sloping around the place, and talked to camera about their spiritual impressions.

They found no Brontës, which is a bit of a relief, but as Henri pointed out to me, “creative people have got better things to do than hang round some old rectory for 150 years”.

Quite right, and Henri should know, being a direct descendant of Jack Llewelyn Davies, the youngest of J. M. Barrie’s Lost Boys. On the other side of her family are the du Mauriers, but she says that she has never had any trouble from Daphne which from the author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn can only be good manners and self-restraint.

Most writers harbour a modest ambition for their work to live on after their deaths. This is becoming less likely as bookshops stop backlisting titles and publishers reinterpret “in print” to mean available on demand. I am not sure how you can demand something that you don’t know exists. The current deluge of new titles is distorting any sense of what is or isn’t worthwhile. What worries me is not that so much of what is published is bad — but that it is competent and mediocre, and is setting a new standard of banality.

Perhaps it will be the writers themselves who will live on after their deaths, while their books are forgotten. The cult of celebrity makes this likely — indeed the heritage industry encourages it, so we know the names and eat the biscuits, but ignore the work.

Part of the Brontë celebration this autumn will be a graphic novel of Wuthering Heights with pictures by Siku and words by the poet Adam Strickson. We are told that this will present the “passionate story” in a “completely new, exciting and innovative way”.

I am fast asleep already. Wuthering Heights is fabulous and doesn’t need pictures. Nor does it need Emily Brontë’s language stripped out and refitted by someone else. Reusing the basic story is what Mills and Boon and Hollywood have been doing for years, and I am not convinced that we should be thrilled by this “radical” idea. A picturebook Brontë is really only for people who can’t manage too many words on the same page.

Don’t get me wrong — graphic novels can be fabulous. The American cartoonist Alison Bechdel is just publishing Fun Home, a memoir of her father; it is a wonderful piece, moving and clever. It was designed to be what it is, and it works. There is no substitute for reading the text in its own right, and I hope that anyone visiting the Brontë Parsonage this autumn will be drawn back to the books, which have nothing of ectoplasm about them, but are what Wordsworth understood as “the real, solid world of images”.

I will also be rereading both Lucasta Miller’s first-rate The Brontë Myth, an exciting synthesis of scholarship and social comment, and Mrs Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, which fixes the moment when the cult of personality for writers begins. And don’t forget the forthcoming Jane Eyre, Sandy Welch’s remarkable adaptation for the BBC, which does full justice to the novel.

Brontë Parsonage, www.bronte.org.uk
Henri Llewelyn Davies 020-7371 6473
BBC One’s Jane Eyre starts on September 24

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