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Literary Passion · Haworth, West Yorkshire

Haworth Parsonage (the Brontës)

The moor-edge parsonage where three sisters, walking the dining-room table nightly, invented Rochester, Heathcliff and a new voltage of desire in English fiction. Charlotte married her father's curate in the church next door in 1854 — the quietest wedding of the century's most passionate imagination.

StatusFact & fiction

Datefamily home 1820–1861

The peopleCharlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Anne Brontë, Arthur Bell Nicholls

The siteBrontë Parsonage Museum, Church Street, Haworth

Coordinates53.83139, -1.95722 (confidence 5/5)

The story

The Brontë family moved to Haworth Parsonage in 1820, when Patrick Brontë became perpetual curate. Of six children, the two eldest died in 1825; the surviving four — Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne — grew up on the edge of the moor inventing imaginary kingdoms. Within about two years around 1847, the three sisters produced Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, novels so intense that reviewers refused to believe women had written them — and they had almost no romantic experience between them.

Emily's Wuthering Heights (1847), published as "Ellis Bell," is a book about obsession outlasting death: Heathcliff desires Catherine for eighteen years after she dies and has her grave opened to see her face. Reviewers called it coarse and brutal — one wondered how anyone could write it "without committing suicide"; another called it "a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."

The best-documented erotic fact in the Brontë story is Charlotte's. In Brussels in 1842–44 she fell in love with her married teacher, Constantin Heger. Back in Haworth she wrote him letters of raw longing; he tore them up, and his wife Zoë stitched the pieces back together with needle and thread. Four survive — you can see the stitching — donated to the British Library in 1913 by Heger's son Paul and printed in The Times on 29 July 1913. Heger became Rochester in Jane Eyre and Paul Emanuel in Villette. Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in June 1854 and died in March 1855, aged 38, in the early stages of pregnancy.

More stories at this spot

The Valentine from the curate

In 1840 the Brontës' father had a handsome young curate, William Weightman, who noticed the three sisters had never received a Valentine. He wrote one for each — and for their friend Ellen Nussey — and walked all the way to Bradford to post them, so the postmark would not give him away. It was, for a while, the closest thing to romance the parsonage saw.

Sources

Nearby on the map

Literary PassionTop Withens (Wuthering Heights inspiration)Haworth, West Yorkshire · England

The wild, windswept ruin traditionally taken as the setting for the Earnshaw home in Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' — the most famous doomed passion in English literature. A Brontë Society plaque (1964) notes the buildings never matched her description but the desolate moorland setting 'may have been in her mind'.

Legend Queer HeritageShibden Hall (Anne Lister & Ann Walker)Halifax, West Yorkshire · England

Home of diarist Anne Lister, the 'first modern lesbian', who lived openly with Ann Walker; the pair considered themselves married after taking communion together in York in 1834. Lister's coded diaries are a UNESCO Memory of the World record.

Documented historyHot spot Al Fresco & WildLover's Leap, Ashwood DaleBuxton, Derbyshire · England

Ashwood Dale's Lover's Leap carried an elopement story and helped sell Buxton's picturesque landscape—the named place is historic, but the lovers belong to folklore.

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