Brontë Country International Living Postcards--your daily escape Thursday, Oct. 26, 2006
Haworth, England The house where the Brontë sisters lived and worked is located at the summit of a long, narrow, steep cobblestone road. This street is lined with quaint little gift shops, 19th-century stores, and tea houses where I spent hours talking to the locals as I feasted on scones, puddings, and all sorts of English desserts, while throwing back pots of tea. For enthusiasts of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, traveling to Haworth, England, the hometown of Charlotte and Emily Brontë, is a kind of pilgrimage to a literary shrine. The Brontë house, the parsonage of father Patrick Brontë, is now a museum handsomely decorated with 19th-century furniture, white-washed walls, carpets, and paintings. Some of the better pieces (such as the dining room table) were bought from the money Charlotte earned from her success with Jane Eyre. My main focus was the dining room where Charlotte, Emily, and Anne spent their evenings discussing their imagined worlds and writing with one another; they had a ritual of walking around the table planning current and future novels. On one side of the dining room is the black sofa where Emily died of consumption (tuberculosis). She refused to rest, and insisted on doing her household chores despite her family's protests; she finally saw a doctor but two hours before she drew her last breath. Passive suicide, in my book, or else she identified too strongly with Catherine, her infamous character from her only novel Wuthering Heights, published the previous year. Wanting to see what it was like to write in the presence of the ghosts Brontë, I sat down on the floor in the corner of the dining room sectioned off by a velvet rope and took out some paper and a pen. What resulted wasn't any competition for Charlotte and Emily but I like to think I may have channeled some of that Brontë genius. From the house I headed out to the moors, retracing the path through the cemetery walked so often by the Brontës. To see and smell the landscape here is to understand the Brontë sisters' passion and motivation to write about the desolate beauty of their sweeping Yorkshire Moors. I returned here every day of my vacation, taking in the spectacular view, breathing in the perfume-scented air, picking the purple heather that has since become a permanent fixture in a vase on my refrigerator in America, sadly so far away from the storybook town of Haworth and the Brontë sisters' glorious moors. Rhonda Findling
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