This portrait is of a family of British writing royalty. Three sisters: Anne. Charlotte. Emily. The Bronte Sisters. During the time of these sisters’ moderate fame and too short lives it was still considered wrong for women to take up any vocation…especially writing. The fame of Jane Austen roughly thirty years before hadn’t left people with a strong impression. They hadn’t caught on yet. So our sisters published their first works under the names of men. This was a common practice (i.e. George Sand, George Eliot). Each of them eventually achieved staggering success in writing classic romantic even gothic, historical fiction, which have become the benchmark in Victorian Literature. Each of them remained unmarried (the term spinsterhood was apt when a young woman reached her early twenties) except for Charlotte whom married two years before her death. This portrait depicts the sisters in appliquéd cameos which recall the splendor of the Victorian Age. Ribbons are also used here, for at the time they were worn to draw attention to the throat of young women who were setting their prospects on marriage.