Haworth
A parsonage on the edge of the moor, a father who outlived all six of his children, and three sisters who wrote novels in the evenings. Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë published under male pseudonyms and were reviewed as a single phenomenon, which is one reason their differences took so long to be noticed.
Anne's Tenant of Wildfell Hall is the most socially radical of the novels and the least read; Charlotte's Shirley is the one most directly about the Yorkshire textile trade. The museum holds manuscripts, letters and the family's books, and the moor behind the house is the landscape that all three used without describing it directly.
A library to check
- Brontë Parsonage Museum — catalogues and digital collections, open to readers online
Books connected to Haworth
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Brontë, 1847. The first great English novel narrated by a woman with no fortune and no intention of apologising for it.
- Wuthering Heights — Emily Brontë, 1847. The most structurally ambitious of the Brontë novels, and the least sentimental.
- The Tenant of Wildfell Hall — Anne Brontë, 1848. The most clear-eyed Brontë novel, and the one that wears least well with romantic readings.
- Shirley — Charlotte Brontë, 1849. The Brontë novel about work and money rather than romance, and the better for it.
- Agnes Grey — Anne Brontë, 1847. Quiet, short and truthful; the best account we have of Victorian governessing from the inside.
A note on accuracy
We describe literary connections and public collections, not street addresses, opening hours or ticket prices. Those change and we cannot verify them for every reader. Follow the institution's own site for current visiting information.