The History of Brontë Parsonage

It is an interesting thought: what if Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë had not come to live at Brontë Parsonage in the little village of Haworth? Would they still have written their great books: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall? Perhaps so, but the story of their life at the parsonage is worthy of a novel in itself.

Charlotte, Emily and Anne, with their father, mother, brother and two older sisters, arrived in the windswept village of Haworth in 1820. Their first years in the parsonage were materially comfortable, but emotionally hard. Their mother died of cancer the following year - Charlotte was just five at the time - and in 1825 their two older sisters died within weeks of each other after being sent away to school. This gave Charlotte the model for the cold, harsh Lowood School she depicted in Jane Eyre.

Stories Around the Fireside
The three remaining sisters clung together and created an imaginary world of story telling. In the Brontës' day, the house would have been sparsely furnished, immaculately clean but with no 'frills' - few carpets and no curtains. Downstairs there was a study for Reverend Brontë, a dining room where the girls did their writing and a kitchen where they would gather round the fire to hear tales told by Tabby, their old Yorkshire servant. They wrote copiously and after a few false starts, Charlotte had the manuscript of Jane Eyre accepted by a London publisher. Anne and Emily soon followed her lead.

They chose to publish under assumed names - Acton, Currer and Ellis Bell, and although the novels were well received, some critics described the writing as coarse and brutal. No one would ever suspect they were the words of a clergyman's three daughters. When their publisher threatened to publish Anne's novel under the more successful 'Currer Bell' name, the girls travelled to London to confront him. How shocked he must have been when these serious young women arrived in his office when he had been expecting burly Yorkshiremen!

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