Where Writing Reached The Heights

The Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth,  North Yorkshire, in the care of the Brontë Society

Some of our most enduring stories were conceived at this Yorkshire parsonage.Jeremy Musson enjoys a literary pilgrimage to its recently restored interiors

A RELATIVELY humble North Yorkshire parson age occupies a remarkable place in the story of English literature. it was the home of the rev Patrick Brontë, a widower, where three of the children he raised there, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, became published novelists of lasting repute. each generation discovers these extraordinary books for themselves and few readers of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights or The Tenant of Wildfell Hall can fail to be curious about the stone walls that contained the short but productive lives of their authors.

It was, in its way, a dignified and secure home, but not without its privations, principally emotional, but also economic and social. A school friend wrote after Charlotte’s death how odd it was that reviewers of her biography by fellow novelist Elizabeth Gaskell never seemed to think it strange that this woman of ‘first-rate talents, industry and integrity’ had lived ‘in a walking night mare of poverty and self-suppression’.

A year after the family arrived there in 1820, the children’s mother, Maria, died; two elder sisters had also died young (the one son, Branwell, died of consumption hastened by addiction to laudanum and alcohol). Their father, a handsome clergyman who had changed his surname from Prunty or Brunty to Brontë and delighted in wearing high cravats like his hero, the Duke of Wellington, outlived his children, dying in 1861.

A house museum since 1928, owned and run by the Brontë Society, the Haworth Parsonage has been through a number of presentations, of which the latest, completed in 2013, was the result of a two-year programme of research by the University of Lincoln, wallpaper expert Allyson McDermott and Ann Dinsdale, the Society’s Principal Curator and author of The Brontës at Haworth (2006).