Welcome to Brontë Country

Wandering through Yorkshire

Pictured: Me earlier today

Dear reader, I enjoyed Yorkshire.

This portion of the trip has offered historical sites, literary treasures, and relaxation as I prepare for a busy next ten days. I’ve purposely built in rest days into my itinerary, but the next few days will be busy as I head to the Peak District ie Derbyshire ie the place where Pemberley is!!!! Expect updates on that in the next few days.

While not literary-related per se, Fountains Abbey is beautiful and I was happy to visit. The intermittent rain only added to the atmosphere. I was honestly happy to walk around for a few hours, as that was my first day driving.

The ruins of Fountains Abbey are the main attraction, although there is also a manor house and water gardens which were eventually built for the nobility who ruled over the place once Henry VIII dissolved the abbey and claimed the land for the crown.

There was also a placard at Fountains claiming it is related to the Robin Hood legend, but, I’ll be so real with you, in the course of my research for this trip, a lot of places in England claim to be related to Robin Hood in some capacity. More interesting was imagining what life was like for the Benedictine monks who once lived there—in medieval times I can’t even imagine how remote it must have been, it’s remote now! It was a self-sufficient place unto itself, like many large abbeys were, and certainly must have felt mystical.

After some grey days, Easter Sunday was glorious and sunny! These past few days in Yorkshire have been a long holiday weekend here in the U.K., so the places I’ve visited have also been popular with English tourists. I wasn’t sure what to expect in Haworth—the small village is a mecca for Brontë fans, due to its situation on the moors made famous in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and having the museum in the parsonage that the siblings Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Branwell lived in before meeting their various tragic ends. But I enjoyed my day in Haworth so much, I sincerely think it’s worth visiting as a charming English town even if you are Brontë-agnostic.

My day started early (it’s actually easy to wake up early here since the sun starts rising at 5:30 AM, so as long as I keep the shades open, that is also when I wake up) as I drove the short distance from where I am staying to Haworth. I was determined to hike through the moors on the so-called Brontë Way, a trail that attempts to recreate where the Brontë sisters might have rambled while growing up in the area. Despite some initial confusion regarding signage, I managed to find it and hiked a total of about 6 miles! It was a thrill to walk through the moors, which are full of heather and birds and hidden streams…it’s very evocative, lonely, I’m sure wandering depressed through the moors hits different.

Top Withins is an abandoned farm which allegedly was part of the inspiration behind the crumbling estate of Wuthering Heights in Emily Brontë’s novel of the same name.

The moors remind me of a desert or an ocean, natural places hiding secrets beneath a seemingly-uniform surface. Perhaps people are also like that. The Brontës certainly took a lot of inspiration from the natural world, and they were true Romantics (with a big R, as in the artistic movement) as they depicted via their novels and poetry a natural world that reflected the internal struggles of characters.

How do I even begin to explain the Brontës…I’ll do my best SparkNotes impression.

Soooooo basically the Brontë patriarch was a parson who moved his wife and six kids out to #%$@#* nowhere (Haworth) and his wife quickly dies. A lot of people are going to die, the tragedy of the Brontës has added to their status as literary legends. So, the older daughters are sent to school, and there two sicken and die, probably in part due to the wretched conditions of the school; Charlotte Brontë no doubt internalized this trauma, as she depicted a similar school and a childhood touched by tragedy in her novel Jane Eyre.

But I get ahead of myself.

This leaves the sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne, and their brother Branwell. Their childhoods are marked by their extreme closeness and their vast imaginations; the siblings concocted detailed imaginary worlds with accompanying stories, poems, periodicals they would create themselves, and so on. I think one of the craziest things about the Brontës is the sisters were all geniuses; Charlotte and Emily obviously had the hits Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, respectively, but Anne wrote The Tenant of Wildfell Hall which is supposed to good. I bought a copy.

imo Branwell was a fuckup—I mean, he suffered from what we now would consider mental illness, so I’m not trying to be harsh…but I also suspect he had a problem with his sisters being better artists than him…and now there’s like this effort of be like ‘oh Branwell’s poetry is actually good’ and it’s like…is it…I might also be biased bc of the jokes about him in Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, which if you know that book you have amazing taste.

ANYWAY, Charlotte publishes Jane Eyre (life-changing perfect no notes my favorite book of all time) under the male pseudonym Currer Bell. The book is a sensation, and subsequently Emily publishes Wuthering Heights under the name Ellis Bell and Anne publishes her first novel as Acton Bell.

Sadly, Emily would die soon after (she was only 30) and Anne a few years later (she was only 29). Branwell preceded them as he succumbed to complications from alcohol abuse. This left only Charlotte as the remaining sibling, as she continued to live with her father; she eventually married but died due to pregnancy complications (most likely hyperemesis gravidarum) at age 39.

It is honestly still so sad to think of all those brilliant people struck down in the prime of life due to the constraints of the time they lived in; it’s easy to romanticize the past, I mean I’m on this whole literary trip through England that’s sort of doing that, but it’s important to remember the past was not a BBC miniseries. Life was brutish and short.

There is a ton of Brontë lore. Being in their house, seeing their writing desks and papers, walking the moors where they walked, all of that felt so special. They were great artists and they live on through their work, and the museum is a testament to that.

I’ll try to summarize in a few words why Jane Eyre in particular means so much to me; it is a book about life as it should be, not always as it is. It’s not escapism, but it’s heightened—the emotions, the imagery, the characters are all so intense, so deeply-felt, so mysterious yet recognizable. Charlotte and her sisters must have been highly sensitive, perhaps too sensitive to be fully in this world—they had to live partly in the land of imagination. I don’t think that’s admirable, but it is relatable. Jane Eyre is about reaching for things just beyond one’s grasp but also how wisdom and maturity come from deep self-knowledge that is not necessarily related to knowledge of the world. After visiting their home, so remote and also so evocative, I imagine that is something the Brontës thought about a lot. It was a pleasure to spend some time in their world.

“That was his most perfect idea of heaven’s happiness: mine was rocking in a rustling green tree, with a west wind blowing, and bright white clouds flitting rapidly above; and not only larks, but throstles, and blackbirds, and linnets, and cuckoos pouring out music on every side, and the moors seen at a distance, broken into cool dusky dells; but close by great swells of long grass undulating in waves to the breeze; and woods and sounding water, and the whole world awake and wild with joy.”

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte