Do we really need another book about the Brontës? Few English writers have been more intensely biographised than Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and since Juliet Barker’s monumental The Brontës of 1995, the historical facts about literature’s most famous family have been placed on record, seemingly definitively. The “three weird sisters”, as Ted Hughes once called them, have been stripped of their accretion of myth; what more is there to be said?

Deborah Lutz’s engaging new study proves that there is indeed room for fresh perspectives. Her highly personal voyage through the sisters’ lives, works and times is less a straight biography than an act of necromancy that allows us to feel the texture of the Brontës’ experience, both inner and outer. She pulls off the hardest trick in literary biography: to make us feel that we know the subjects intimately, and, simultaneously, to make the familiar strange and remind us of the space that separates us from the dead.

It is not surprising that Lutz is so alive to the paradoxes and emotional nuances involved in recovering past lives. Her previous book, Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture, is a study of the 19th-century habit of memorialising the dead, when mourning was an almost sensual act, expressed through touching and owning physical objects associated with lost loved ones. Literary historical scholarship is of itself, perhaps, an academically sanctioned form of ancestor worship in our own society; few, however, approach the texts they study with Lutz’s feeling for material culture.

Among the illustrations in this book is a photograph of a lock cut from the hair of the Brontës’ mother, Maria, who died of cancer in 1821, leaving her husband with five small children to bring up. As a result, the bereaved Patrick Brontë – a clergyman of limited means – sent his daughters to a charity boarding school, where the two eldest, Maria and Elizabeth, fell ill. Both died. Charlotte never fully recovered from the experience, which she later transmuted into Jane Eyre, with its nightmarish portrayal of Lowood school. As Lutz puts it, the Brontë children “never stopped trying to find in the act of writing a means to overcome death”. Their mother’s auburn hair fragment is startlingly vivid. Seeing it shows, poignantly, how things can sometimes do what words cannot when it comes to bringing back the dead.

Lutz builds her thematic narrative around physical objects connected with the Brontës, all of which have their own tales to tell. Best known are the tiny books they made as children, full of stories that gave Charlotte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell the impression of creative excitement carried almost to insanity. Here we are introduced to these miniature texts in the flesh. Made from cut-up fragments of waste paper, some printed with advertisements, and sewn with brown yarn, they inspire Lutz to make a detour into social and economic history; we learn how a tax on paper, not repealed until 1860, pushed up the price and necessitated recycling.

Lutz’s narrative mode wheels and soars in a series of fascinating digressions. The samplers made by the Brontë girls, for example, along with Charlotte’s wooden workbox (it still contains some of its contents, including buttons, a measuring tape and thread), prompt an exploration of sewing as a social practice, and of its emotional meaning for women at the time. The Brontë novels contain frequent freighted references to needlework, and the contradictory feelings it inspired. When Jane Eyre makes her famous speech on gender equality – “Women feel as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do” – she angrily complains of the “stagnation” of a life devoted to “embroidering bags”. Yet sewing was not always seen as oppressive; it was creative too, not just as an activity but as a meaningful female mode of exchange. Charlotte often sewed presents for her friend Ellen Nussey, including a pair of fancy slippers; in Villette, her fictional counterpart Lucy Snowe signals her romantic attachment to Paul Emanuel by making him a decorative watch-guard (such beaded or embroidered strips, as Lutz explains, were often used instead of a metal chain to attach the watch to a gentleman’s clothing). Sewing could symbolise emotional – indeed bodily – intimacy; but it could also be a protective shield. By burying herself in her “work”, a woman could avoid conversing in drawing-rooms with people she did not want to talk to.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The 1939 film adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Photograph: Allstar

Unlike her more sociable sister, Emily never made any significant friend outside her family. According to one acquaintance, quoted here, she “never showed regard to any human creature; all her love was reserved for animals”. As one would expect from the author of Wuthering Heights – which notoriously includes a brutal scene in which puppies are casually hanged – she was not, however, sentimental in her approach to dogs, cats, birds and other species. When her adored dog Keeper disobediently lay on the bed, she pummelled his face with her fists until his eyes swelled so much that he could barely see. Emily had a cruel, proto-Darwinian vision of human relations, which she saw as a reflection of the animal kingdom. Lutz moves effortlessly from critical-philosophical analysis of Emily’s writings to the nitty-gritty of canine biography. Keeper’s collar – a somewhat uncomfortable-looking brass circlet, proudly engraved with “The Rev P Brontë, Haworth” – prompts an investigation into Victorian attitudes to pets. But what breed was he? Lutz decides he must have been a mix of bulldog, terrier and mastiff.

As one would expect, Lutz is particularly insightful on the material aspects of writing. Private letters as well as literary manuscripts feature here, such as the desperate love letters Charlotte wrote to the Belgian teacher who taught her when she attended a school in Brussels, and with whom she became infatuated. He tore them up and threw them away, but his suspicious wife retrieved them from the wastepaper basket and stitched the fragments together, with the result that the wounded-looking documents have survived for posterity. Another key item is Emily’s portable writing-desk in which, in the autumn of 1845, Charlotte made the momentous discovery of a poetry manuscript, which not only convinced her of Emily’s genius, but galvanised her literary ambitions for herself and her sisters, ultimately prompting them into publication. Had Charlotte not rifled through Emily’s desk, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights might never have been written. First told to the public by Charlotte in the brief “Biographical Notice” of her sisters she published in 1850, this is one of the most famous anecdotes in the Brontë story; told in a new way, which stresses the physicality of Charlotte’s act of intrusion into Emily’s private space, it takes on new life.

Lutz has a rare capacity for imaginative empathy and so fine a nose for detail that she even revels in the smell of some of the Brontë-related artefacts she has encountered. All lovers of the Brontës should read this book. It will perhaps mean most to those who already have some prior knowledge of the sisters’ lives and works, but it is equally capable of whetting the appetites of those coming to them for the first time.

• Lucasta Miller is the author of The Brontë Myth, published by Vintage. To order The Brontë Cabinet for £17.99 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.