April 2024 – The Bronte Parsonage Museum
Lots of pictures for you to look at this month. And I’m definitely talking about one of my favorite things, the marvelous, atmospheric, poignant Bronte Parsonage Museum at Haworth in Yorkshire.
I had visited once before in 1985 on my first visit to the UK. I was there on a wild and windy day that seemed ripped right out of Wuthering Heights so the small house with the graveyard pressing up against the windows seemed just perfect as the home of the genius sisters who wrote some of my favorite books. With the high moors towering over the village, it wasn’t hard to picture Heathcliff and Cathy running through the dramatic landscape in an excess of passion.
Last month, I was lucky enough to take part in a writers’ retreat at Hebden Bridge which turned out to be only a half-hour bus trip away from Haworth, via the Bronte Bus, no less! How could I resist revisiting? Especially when my fellow retreater had never been.
I’m a bit of a Bronte freak. Their story was so strange and so inspirational to a girl who wanted to be a writer that I was in love with the whole idea of the sisters before I even read their books. I remember reading one of those children’s biographies when I was about 11 and how powerfully the sisters’ lonely, short, intense lives affected me. I’d tried to read Jane Eyre when I was about 12 but couldn’t make it through the school scenes. However, when I finally read it all in my late teens, I was ready to encounter a book that is still in my top 10.
I did Wuthering Heights in my last year of high school, just as Kate Bush’s haunting, beautiful take on the story hit the top of the charts. Still love that song. I haven’t read the book in a few years so I’m not sure I’d still be in love with Heathcliff. I definitely was as a teen!
Over the coming years, I re-read WH and JE on a fairly regular basis and also tackled Shirley and Villette. I remember finding Shirley a bit of a slog, although there are some good things in it. I enjoyed Villette until I got to the rather unsatisfactory ending. Jane Eyre never lost its charm. I’m ashamed to say I’m yet to try an Anne Bronte. Perhaps that can be my project for when I get back home.
Anyway, back to the museum. My mind was blown as it was the first time around by how small everything was. All those titanic minds in such a confined space. Wow! The first picture shows the dining room, which is where the sisters and Branwell used to write, reading out aloud as they strode around the table. Which is the actual table they worked on, returned to the parsonage in 2015. The couch is where Emily died in 1848 at the tragically early age of 30.
One of the thing that always strikes me about the Brontes is the scale of the tragic loss they endured. Patrick Bronte arrived to take up his post as a clergyman in Haworth in 1820 with a beloved wife and 6 children, 5 girls and a boy. In 1821, Maria, Patrick’s wife died. The three oldest sisters, Maria, Elizabeth and Charlotte were sent to the awful Cowan Bridge school where they would later be joined by Emily. Neither Elizabeth nor Maria survived the experience, both dying in 1825.
It’s after this that the close creative and emotional bonds were established between the remaining sisters and their brother Branwell, a troubled soul who eventually succumbed to the lure of drugs and alcohol. The next horror period in the Bronte saga was seven months between September 1848 when Branwell died and May 1849 when Anne died at the age of 29, with Emily passing away in the time between.
Poor Charlotte was left alone. She married in 1854 and died in the early stages of pregnancy in 1855 at the age of 39. Patrick lived on to the age of 84, dying in 1861.
The final picture is of the 1951 sculpture of the three sisters taken from inside the house.
If you’re anywhere near the parsonage, it’s well worth a visit. As well as the restored rooms, there’s a small museum that contains items belonging to the family. Something I remember from my first visit was that they had a lot of manuscripts out on show – I particularly remember the tiny books the Brontes wrote as children with writing so small, you need a magnifying glass to read it. It was a pity none of those were on display this time round, although I suspect that could be reasons of preservation.
If you do go to Haworth, leave time to check out the shops on the main street. There are a couple of great bookshops and some wonderful gift shops there.
