Have you ever visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum?
I’d been meaning to visit the former home of the Brontë sisters in Haworth ever since I got the germ of an idea for an alternative version of Jane Eyre. Last Monday, two years after that initial impetus, I finally made it.
I’d been as a child, on a family visit inspired by my mother’s evening class in Wuthering Heights, but couldn’t remember much about it, apart from the tiny books the sisters made along with their brother. Well, it was a l-o-n-g time ago.
I arrived on foot, having walked the five and a half miles from Keighley, treading the paths the Brontës might have taken on return from their travels. Unlike them, I could catch a bus back to the railway station, rather than having to walk both ways.
It’s another steep walk up a cobbled street lined with cafes and gift shops (albeit not as many as I expected) to the parsonage at the top of the village.
(No, I don’t think that car was there in Charlotte’s time!)
The house itself, just past the church, looks rather grand, although the wing on the right is a a more recent extension. Inside, the rooms are quite small. Hard to believe that the sisters had hoped to establish a girls’ boarding school in their home.
The dining room (on the left), where the sisters had gathered at the table to write their novels, particularly surprised me. I suppose there is room for three, but there’s not much privacy and I’d imagined them being quite secretive about their work until it was finished – or maybe they just had to hide it from their father and brother.
Other highlights for me were Charlotte’s dress (on the left) and the apostles cabinet (far left), the latter because it’s one of the few (only?) artefacts in the museum that features in Jane Eyre. In daylight, it’s an attractive piece of furniture but in the novel it takes on gruesome proportions when Jane is called to attend to a wounded visitor by candlelight.
This cupboard didn’t belong to the family, but Charlotte would have seen it at North Lees Hall (the inspiration for Thornfield) when she visited in 1845, or thereabouts, and it must have made an impression. I remember being disappointed it wasn’t at North Lees the first time I saw inside the hall on an open day about fifteen years ago.
The beginning of my walk from Keighley
Kitchen in the Brontë Parsonage
Charlotte’s sampler
Have you visited the Brontë Parsonage Museum? If so, what did you think? If you’d like to know more, go here to learn more about it.
And if you’re inspired to learn more about the Brontës, I can heartily recommend a novel, Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell, which sticks pretty close to the facts. it’s a a lovely compassionate story of young women who appear to be oddities on the surface, with brilliant minds bubbling underneath. Click on the title to read my review.
