[This post is image heavy. Be patient! It's worth it.]
Esther and I have just arrived back from our short weekend stay in Haworth, once home to the Bronte sisters and now the second most popular 'literary' destination in the United Kingdom. (Answers on a postcard as to which is the most popular... ;-)) It is a surprising and strange little place. Situated on a steep Yorkshire hillside, looking out over Keighley and the Worth Valley, it is part working town, part tourist trap: local-pubs-for-local-people rubbing shoulders with upmarket restaurants, and lingerie boutiques nestled by bric-a-brac merchants. Unlike many other 'quaint' Yorkshire villages, it still feels real - as though people actually live and work there - and has yet to be colonised by the holiday-home middle classes. It still has the 'awwwww' factor, but with a harsh charisma mixed in. Perhaps it is because it is sited in such a steep and unforgiving landscape; or because it is so close to the old industrial heartland of Yorkshire, with Bradford, Saltaire and Shipley all near by. Either way, it manages to be both melancholic and vibrant, sad and brash.
Because neither Esther nor I drive, we travelled to Haworth the only way you can on public transport: via Keighley train station. When Virginia Woolf visited in 1904, on the same route, she noted:
Keighley - pronounced Keethly - is often mentioned in the Life [of Charlotte Bronte, by Elizabeth Gaskell]; it was a big town four miles from Haworth to which Charlotte walked to make her more important purchases... It is a big manufacturing town, hard and stony, and clattering with business, in the way of these northern towns. They make small provision for the sentimental traveller... [Haworth, November 1904, in Essays, Vol 1).
No, indeed. The Keighley we arrived in on Friday was bleak, rainy and absolutely clogged with traffic. It was about as depressing and unattractive as a place can be and the above scene (taken from the shelter of the train station foyer) convinced us to splash out on a taxi rather than trekking on to the bus station for the last few miles of our journey. All was forgiven, however, as we climbed up into Haworth itself - it is literally above all of the gunk and spew of the densely populated valley.
The weather cleared up sufficiently that we didn't need our umbrellas and our guesthouse turned out to be all things comfortable and welcoming. Having dumped our luggage and recharged with tea and chocolate, we trundled off to explore the village and to find the famous Bronte Parsonage. We didn't have to look very far, as it turned out we were staying all of three minutes from its front door. For those unfamiliar with the area, the Parsonage sits at the very top of the village, which is pitched on a very sharp incline, and directly in front of it is the huge, packed graveyard (reputedly home to 40,000 of the village's dead), which extends downhill for almost 100 yards to the Church. Beyond that is the main street, and beyond that the long, steep road to the Victorian train station, long since abandoned by National Rail. By the time we arrived it was gathering dusk and the atmosphere in and around the graveyard was palpable; the tall trees in amongst the stones are home to literally hundreds of rooks, possibly the most racous and chilling of birds. As we wandered in and about, they began calling out to each other with their hoarse 'caw-caw' and rising up from their nests in their dozens. Very freaky.
Standing at the bottom of the yard, with the church clock tower as your back, you can see the Parsonage through the trees and the place where the Bronte's front gate used to be. The wall was bricked up in the early 20th century but in the 1840s and 50s the sisters would have gone to and from Church and the village through the crush of gravestones; a rather sombre plaque on the wall also notes that their bodies were carried that way to their final rest in the family tomb.
The next day we went into the Parsonage itself, an almost unique experience - the place has been laid out as a shrine to the sisters, right down to the most minute of details, using their own sketches of the interior as guides. The furniture and ephemera are all original and authentic, from the sofas and upholstered chairs, to the spectacles (Charlotte's, Patrick's and Emily's) and the kitchen utensils. All have been reassembled with excruciating care. It is almost macabre in its intimacy.
Above is the sofa on which Emily died, and the shawl that covered her; later in the exhibition is Anne's blood stained hankerchief (like her sister and brother before her, she died of consumption) and the bonnet that Charlotte made for the child she was carrying when she past away. It is all very moving and, at the same time, quite eery, as though you have climbed into the still-warm bed of the past. Both Esther and I felt choked, especially in the rooms upstairs - the bedrooms and the nursery - where Charlotte's personal items were on display: a worn dress, several pairs of shoes, jewellery, locks of hair, a parasol, a sewing box (its contents exactly the same as she left them). It is not quite as cramped or dismal as Elizabeth Gaskell would have us believe in her Life. Although it is relatively small and cold, it is still light and it isn't difficult to imagine it being a beloved home. (That said, below is Emily's tiny bedroom.)
One of the museum's raison d'etre is to counteract some of the Bronte 'myths', especially those surrounding the family's interpersonal dynamic. It is very positive, for example, about Patrick Bronte's relationship with his daughters and paints the sisters as pro-active and confident novelists rather than as sickly geniuses circumscribed by a gruelling homelife. It maintains a kind of ambivalence towards their creative work, shying away from critical judgements (which is probably for the best) and only intimating at autobiographical inspiration, most of which is long established anyway (e.g. Lowood in Jane Eyre being based on Charlotte's own experiences at school; Vilette on her experiences at finishing college in Brussels). It never takes visitor's prior knowledge for granted, providing lots of basic detail about the Brontes' lives and work, and on the day we visited, this seemed to be entirely necessary. A lot of the tourists in our vicinity had only a rudimentary knowledge of who the sisters were and what they did.
It is hard to say whether visiting the Parsonage has added to my appreciation of the Brontes' novels. Gaskell (and many subsequent biographers and critics) have made the assumption that Haworth and the texts are somehow inextricably linked; that the place explains the fiction and the fiction explains the place. I'm sure that this is only partly true - environment does affect the mind and the imagination but it doesn't represent the fullest extent of a person's experience. The Brontes, particularly Emily, are often imagined as virtual recluses in the Parsonage, constantly bearing the brunt of the wind, the bleakness of the moors and the mortality of the graveyard but knowing about very little else. Which is sufficiently Romantic, no doubt, but hardly true - in fact, they travelled fairly often (certainly more often than many of their contemporaries) and read very widely.
Still, it is easy to understand why landscape plays such an important part in Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. On Saturday afternoon Esther and I took a walk up to the top of Penistone Hill from which it is possible to look down across the full extent of Haworth moor. It is still a gorgeously wild place, rocked by gusty winds and roofed with dramatic sky-scapes.
We picked some of the tough purple heather that carpets the whole area, and took it to lay on Charlotte and Emily's unassuming memorial stone. It isn't original since the old Church, the one that the Bronte's knew, was knocked down and rebuilt in the 1870s, but it is fixed over the spot of their burial.
And what did we do after that? We went and thoroughly explored Haworth's disproporitionate number of book shops. Yum.
The selection was mostly random (and all very reasonably priced) but I couldn't quite resist buying a copy of Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte. I'd been meaning to read it before the Haworth pilgrimage but hadn't been able to find it in a York bookshop (shame on them!) and we was reduced to purchasing it full price from the Parsonage Museum. It had to be done though. It wouldn't be a proper literary holiday without a themed purchase. Prizes for best finds go to the delightful little copy of Sowing, the first volume of Leonard Woolf's autobiography, and to the Penguin edition of the The Greek Alexander Romance, which is in pristine condition. The prize for most random purchase goes, unsurprisingly, to the biography of Ottoline Morrell - I didn't even know there was such a thing. I only know of her through reading Hermione Lee's work on Virginia Woolf, in which she casts a rather eccentric well-to-do shadow, but Miranda Seymour's book makes her sound fascinating in her own right. I'm excited to dig into it. The volume of Virginia Woolf essays was something of a foregone conclusion; I can't resist anything Woolfian.
I leave you with this image of Esther, looking suitably literary, in the Bronte's back meadow. Perfect, isn't it?
~~Victoria~~