Home Articles Videos Performance ... r GlobalAdventure.us HAWORTH, HOME OF THE BRONTES
by Judith Fein
It's a gray, dismal, rainy day in northern England. What a perfect time to visit that bastion of gothic girlhoodwhere the Bronte sisters lived, wrote, repressed their emotions and most of them died. Haworth is the ideal location for romantics who have read and loved Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or Ann Bronte's Tenant of Wildfell Hall. A group of Bronte fans, all probably dreaming of the wild and passionate characters of Heathcliff and Catherine, huddles under umbrellas at the Bronte homestead, in front of the old stone church. A hundred and fifty years ago, the Brontes' austere father, Reverend Patrick Bronte, preached his sermons here. Today, there is a local band accompanying a modern-day preacher. Any bona fide Bronte enthusiast can easily picture the three little girls standing here in the rain, enthralled. The parishoners look down at their well-worn song books, and they begin to sing. Their voices waft over the parish graveyard that the girls walked through every day. It's these gray, lugubrious tombstones that fueled the girls' imaginations, offering up character names and telling tales of infact mortality, typhoid and personal tragedy. The Bronte home, otherwise known as The Parsonage, is open to tourists, and the Victorian interior has been preserved intact. There's the piano the girls played, the dining room table which Charlotte, Emily and Ann circled as they read and critiqued each others' writing at night. There is a palpable aura of sadness around the sofa where Emily expired, stoically concealing her tuberculosis from her loved ones until hours before her demise. And there's the back kitchen where the motherless girls learned to knead and cook and carve. | |
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