Guide · Literary Brontë
← Back to Guides
The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is the most visited literary house museum in the north of England and one of the most significant in the world. It occupies the house where the Brontë family lived from 1820, when Patrick Brontë was appointed perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church in Haworth, until Emily and Anne had died (in 1848 and 1849 respectively), Charlotte had married Arthur Bell Nicholls (in 1854) and died herself the following year, and Patrick Brontë lived on alone until his death in 1861.
Most visitors arrive expecting a modest Victorian parsonage and leave with something considerably more complicated in their heads.
The parsonage is a Georgian house of modest proportions — two storeys on the main front, with a two-storey wing added later. It is smaller than most visitors expect. The rooms where Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall were written are not large. Charlotte's bedroom, which she shared in childhood with Emily and Anne, would not be described as spacious.
The scale is important. Standing in the dining room where all three sisters wrote — a room perhaps four metres by five — with the moorland visible through the window and the church visible through the side window, you understand something about the intensity of the household that a biography does not quite convey. The space was small; the imaginations it contained were enormous.
The entrance hall — small, with the stairs directly ahead. The parsonage received few visitors; it was not designed for entertaining.
The dining room — where Charlotte, Emily and Anne gathered in the evenings to write. The table at the centre of the room is where the novels were written, in the evenings after Patrick had gone to bed. Charlotte later described the habit she and Emily and Anne had of walking around the table together, reading aloud to each other and discussing their work.
Patrick Brontë's study — the room from which the household was run. Patrick's desk, his pistol (he discharged it from the window every morning, according to Charlotte's account — he was afraid of fire), his books and papers. He survived all his children.
The kitchen — Tabitha Aykroyd, the family's long-serving servant, is central to the Brontë story. The kitchen is her domain and the place where much of the household's daily life was lived.
Charlotte's bedroom — containing the small sofa on which Charlotte died in March 1855, three months after her marriage, at the age of 38. The room is also where Emily died in December 1848 and Anne Brontë in 1849. Three deaths in the same room within six years.
Branwell's studio — the older rooms of the house include space used by Patrick Branwell Brontë, the only brother, who was trained as a portrait painter and was for a time seen as the most talented of the Brontë siblings. His decline — through alcohol, opium and the consequences of a disastrous affair — is one of the most painful episodes in the Brontë story.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum holds the most important Brontë archive in the world — manuscripts, letters, drawings, early writings, personal possessions and the extraordinary tiny books that the Brontë children made as children, written in a hand so small as to be almost illegible, describing the invented worlds of Angria and Gondal. These miniature books, made from scraps of paper sewn together into pamphlets, are among the most remarkable documents of childhood imagination in literary history.
The collection is not all displayed simultaneously — the museum rotates items to protect them from light — but the core exhibits are consistently on show and the quality of the curation is high.
Opening hours: The museum opens most days of the year. Check the Brontë Parsonage Museum website for current hours and any closed dates. It closes on 25–26 December.
Admission: Adult admission is currently around £12 (check current prices). Entry is included in our Brontë Country Day Trip.
Booking: Advance booking is recommended in summer and at weekends. On our tour, entry is pre-booked and confirmed before the day — no queuing at the door.
Time needed: Allow at least an hour. An hour and a half is better. Two hours if you are a serious Brontë reader.
Photography: Photography is permitted in most areas without flash. Some items in the collection cannot be photographed.
The churchyard that surrounds the parsonage is the resting place of Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Patrick Brontë (Anne is buried in Scarborough, where she died on a journey undertaken in hopes that sea air would improve her tuberculosis). The graves are simple, reflecting Patrick Brontë's own temperament and the limited means of the family at the time of each death.
Standing in the churchyard, with the parsonage on one side and the moors visible above the church tower, is the moment that most visitors find the most affecting. The distance between the graves and the moors that produced Wuthering Heights is perhaps three hundred metres.
Haworth Parsonage entry is included in our Brontë Country Day Trip. £179 per person. Maximum seven guests.
Planning a Brontë Country day? These go well together:
At least an hour, or two for serious Brontë readers.
In 1820, when Patrick Brontë was appointed perpetual curate of St Michael and All Angels Church.
Yes.