Bronte Parsonage Museum| Walk where Jacob Elrodi and Margot Robbie did in ‘Wuthering Heights’

An artist’s sketch of Haworth Parsonage, the former residence of the celebrated Bronte sisters — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — hangs in my childhood home. Nearly 40 years old, the framed casement cloth captures the parsonage as it was in their day — a Georgian house on a desolate landscape overlooking a churchyard with moss-covered tombstones askew. The famed Yorkshire moors lie beyond — bruised by rain, mist floating eerily above the sodden grass. A landscape that the sisters saw every time they looked outside the window and one that influenced much of their writing, especially Emily’s gothic Wuthering Heights featuring the star-crossed lovers Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw struggling to defy their fate on those moors. The novel is back in the news with the release of the Emerald Fennell film starring Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie bringing a new flush of interest in the Bronte Parsonage Museum (BPM).

Diane Fare, outreach officer, BPM, says, “Urbanisation has had little impact on the immediate surrounding of the parsonage. A photograph taken today would look very similar to a sketch drawn in the Brontes’ time. Haworth itself is also relatively unchanged. The shops on the cobbled Main Street are different — there are now cafes and gift shops rather than butchers and tailors — but the buildings look as they once did. Beyond the village, the moors are the same.” 

The BPM is helmed by the Bronte Society, founded in 1893 to promote interest in the Bronte family and their works. Its aim was to set up a permanent home for items belonging to the Brontes, and the first museum opened in 1895 above the Yorkshire Penny Bank on Haworth Main Street. Haworth Parsonage was bought by Sir James Roberts and gifted to the non-profit in 1928 when it opened as the BPM. “The Society sought to restore it to how it would have appeared in the Brontes’ time and nearly all the objects and furniture on display belonged to the family,” says Diane.

The BPM, open Wednesday to Monday, stands now in a well-set garden crowded with trees and flower beds. Wandering through its rooms that house writing desks, letters, clothes and more, one wonders how the daughters of a country clergyman who battled illness perpetually, produced some of the most dramatic novels in the English language. It was Charlotte who encouraged her siblings to publish their works and they first did under pseudonyms. 

“It’s impossible to say who was the most popular,” says Diane. “Charlotte and Emily are better known than their younger sister Anne, but many visitors know of Anne’s novels, particularly The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Charlotte was the most famous in her lifetime and we know more about her, simply because she lived longer and corresponded with people throughout her life (particularly her best friend Ellen Nussey),” she says, adding, “Many visitors are huge fans of Jane Eyre and are here to see where the novel was written. Whilst we know less about Emily, her only novel Wuthering Heights has fascinated readers since it was published in 1847 and fans of the novel are keen to visit where the enigmatic Emily grew up and to walk the landscape that so inspired her. Since the announcement of the new Wuthering Heights film, sales of the novel has rocketed. Visitor numbers are in the region of 60,000-70,000 a year and the split is 80% domestic tourists, 20% from overseas.”

The BPM collection is certified a Designated Collection by Arts Council England. For the London premiere of the film, Margot Robbie wore a custom replica of a 19th-Century hairwork bracelet from the BPM. Originally made from Emily and Anne’s hair, the bracelet was recreated by Haworth-based Wyedean Weaving to honour the literary history of the film’s source material. 

“Picking one object of memorabilia from the collection is too hard,” says Diane. “I love the sewing boxes (called workboxes in the Brontes’ time) as they were obviously heavily used by the sisters and you get a glimpse into their everyday domestic lives. In Charlotte’s, there are paper patterns for cutting out clothes to be sewn, the snipped-off finger ends of kid gloves, a piece of whalebone stay, a pair of black silk cuffs, and some round, pink pillboxes with pills still inside. Anne stored pebbles collected on the beach in Scarborough.” 

An equal favourite is the diary papers written by Emily and Anne. “They wrote their first diary paper in November 1834 (when Emily was 16 and Anne, 14) and over the next 11 years, they filled a scrap of paper with the minutiae of a parsonage day in micro script. By the 1840s, Emily and Anne had established rules for the diary papers. They were to be written on Emily’s birthday – July 30 – and on the same day they would open and read the previous ones, written four years earlier.” 

As a portal into how the Brontes’ lived and with a slew of exhibitions, talks and film screenings coming up, BPM and Wuthering Heights live on in collective memory, long after the moors have been covered in mist.