Guide · Literary Brontë
← Back to Guides
Most visitors to Haworth arrive with some knowledge of the Brontë family. Most leave knowing considerably more than when they arrived — partly because the landscape makes the novels more immediate, and partly because the story of the family is so much stranger and more interesting than the versions of it that circulate in secondary school English classes.
This guide is a literary introduction for visitors who want to know the essential background before they arrive. It is not a comprehensive account — the scholarship on the Brontës fills libraries — but it gives you what you need to get the most from a day in Haworth and on the moors.
Patrick Brontë (1777–1861) was an Irishman from County Down who had, by the time he was appointed to Haworth in 1820, already had an extraordinary life. He was born into poverty, educated himself sufficiently to gain a place at St John's College, Cambridge, was ordained as a Church of England clergyman and served in several parishes before arriving in Haworth with his wife Maria and six children. He was also a published poet and writer, a fact that tends to be overshadowed by his children's subsequent fame.
Maria Brontë (née Branwell) died in 1821, a year after the family's arrival in Haworth. She was 38. Patrick did not remarry. The six children — Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily and Anne — were raised in the parsonage by their father and an aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, who came from Penzance to help and never returned home.
Maria and Elizabeth, the two oldest daughters, died of tuberculosis contracted at the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge in 1825. Charlotte was ten years old. Emily was seven. Anne was five. Patrick Branwell was not yet old enough to attend.
Charlotte was the oldest surviving child after the deaths of Maria and Elizabeth, and in many ways the leader of the four remaining siblings. She was educated partly at schools (Roe Head, later Brussels) and partly at home, and spent much of her adult life working as a governess — a position she found both socially and emotionally difficult. Her correspondence with her friend Ellen Nussey covers forty years and thousands of letters and is one of the most illuminating collections in Victorian literature.
Jane Eyre (1847) — published under the pseudonym Currer Bell — was an immediate sensation. Its first-person narrative, its focus on the inner life and autonomy of a woman without wealth or social position, and its emotional directness were startlingly new. The novel made Charlotte famous, though her identity as the author was not immediately known.
Charlotte's later novels — Shirley (1849) and Villette (1853) — are less read but rich with her experience: Shirley is partly a response to Emily's death, and Villette, which draws heavily on her time in Brussels, is by some readings her finest work.
Charlotte married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, in June 1854. She died in March 1855, three months pregnant. She was 38, the same age as her mother at death.
Emily is the most mysterious of the three sisters, and the one whose literary achievement is most disproportionate to what is known of her life. She published very little — Wuthering Heights (1847) and a collection of poems (1846, largely unnoticed at the time) represent almost the entirety of her published output.
Wuthering Heights is the novel that becomes less explicable the more you know about it. It was written by a woman who had barely left Yorkshire, who seems to have had no significant romantic relationships, who was intensely private and who died aged 30 from tuberculosis contracted at her brother Branwell's funeral. The ferocity, sophistication and originality of the novel — its structural complexity, its exploration of obsession, cruelty and the moors as a psychological landscape — is one of the enduring mysteries of English literature.
Emily died in December 1848, six months after the publication of Wuthering Heights. She refused to see a doctor or to rest. She got up and attempted to dress herself on the morning of the day she died.
Anne is the most underrated of the three sisters, and the one whose critical rehabilitation is most overdue. She published two novels: Agnes Grey (1847), a spare and honest account of life as a governess that draws directly from her own experience, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), which is by some measures the most radical of the three sisters' novels.
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall is a novel about domestic abuse and female autonomy, published in 1848. It was controversial immediately — Charlotte, acting as literary executor after Anne's death, suppressed it for years, apparently finding it too stark. Anne died of tuberculosis in May 1849, at Scarborough, where she had gone hoping that sea air would help her. She was 29.
Patrick Branwell Brontë was, as a young man, regarded as the most talented of the siblings. He was trained as a portrait painter, had genuine artistic ability and was for a period the main hope of the family. His decline — through alcohol, laudanum and the emotional collapse that followed the end of his employment as a tutor at a house in the Lake District — is one of the most painful episodes in the family story.
Branwell died in September 1848, aged 31. Emily died three months later; Anne six months after that.
The landscape that surrounds Haworth — Stanbury Moor, the Worth Valley, the area around Top Withens known locally as Brontë country — is not incidental to the work. Emily Brontë, in particular, was deeply connected to the moorland above the village. She walked it throughout her life, often alone, in conditions that alarmed the rest of the family. The moor in her writing is not a backdrop — it is an active participant, reflecting and amplifying the psychological states of the characters in ways that no other landscape in the novel could.
Standing on the moor above Haworth, looking north towards the dark ridgeline of the main Pennine watershed, with the wind coming off the high ground, is the closest most readers will come to understanding the emotional register that produced Wuthering Heights.
The Brontë Country Day Trip includes Haworth Parsonage entry, time on the moors and a guide who knows the full story. Book here.
Planning a Brontë Country day? These go well together:
County Down, Ireland — he was born into poverty and educated himself to a place at St John's College, Cambridge.
38, a year after the family arrived in Haworth in 1821.
Six — Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Patrick Branwell, Emily and Anne.