Wuthering Heights at the Cross Roads Inn and Jane Eyre at the club

Another Brontë-related place has been saved from speculation. Some months ago Keighley News reported that

The landlady of a Cross Roads pub has warned it could be bulldozed because its owner wants to sell it to property developers.
Gail Kellett, 54, licensee of the Cross Roads Inn, said she was dismayed when she learned the building could be demolished to make way for a food store.
She has now started a petition to try to save the building. "It's a part of the village and it's got quite a lot of character and history," she said.
"I've fallen in love with it and I think it's unbelievable that they might knock it down."
Gail, who has been the landlady of the inn for a year, said Copper Dragon Brewery in Skipton offered to buy the building and retain it as a pub.

The petition has been succesful:

The Cross Roads Inn at Cross Roads, Keighley, has been rescued by Skipton-based brewery Copper Dragon after villagers supported a Save Our Local campaign.
Customers are so pleased they have been e-mailing brewery bosses to thank them for reviving the ancient pub, which is said to have been a haunt of Branwell Bronte, brother of the famous Bronte sister authors from nearby Haworth.

If it was only 'said to have been a haunt'! The Cross Roads Inn has the dubious honour of being the place where the 'was Wuthering Heights actually written by Branwell Brontë' question was born. Lucasta Miller, in The Brontë Myth (ch. 8), explains it very concisely:

Under the headline 'Who wrote Wuthering Heights?' Dearden described a meeting which had taken place in the summer of 1842 between himself, Branwell and their sculptor friend Joseph Leyland at the Cross Roads Inn between Haworth and Keighley. A month earlier, the two poets had each agreed to produce a verse composition set in the mythical time before the Deluge. But when Branwell arrived at the appointed pub to show off his handiwork, he found that he had accidentally picked up the wrong manuscript. What he read out was not the antediluvian poem 'Azrael or the Eve of Destruction' he had written in answer to Dearden's challenge, but a fragment whose scene and characters 'so far as then developed' were, according to Dearden, 'the same as those in Wuthering Heights, which Charlotte Bronté [sic] confidently asserts was the production of her sister Emily'.

Our mind is very made up on this matter, but make your own conclusions. So, you see, the Cross Roads Inn is not just any haunt of Branwell Brontë. It does have a history. We now wonder whether the new landlord Chris Marsden will profit from our instruction ;)

On a somewhat related note, SF Weekly reviews a club called the Supperclub. We were surprised to read the following:

Despite a bar full of well-heeled professionals, a young woman was sitting to my left by herself as well. She was reading Jane Eyre. That book has one of my favorite beginnings, where Jane is hidden in a nook and reading, lost in her own world. There was a reason that I ended up at this place all alone, I just knew it. [...]
I was also excited to see the Jane Eyre reader sit down right beside me. We chit-chatted and she asked me, in a roundabout way, why I was there by myself. Then I did something that I never do. Blame it on the Charlotte Bronté [sic] or the Vicodin, but I told her that I was there because I was from SF Weekly and I was checking this place out. Her eyes got huge and she said, "My boyfriend's the manager of Supperclub!" Oh shit. Apparently I had broken my journalist's vow of silence to the wrong person.

Charlotte Brontë would have been puzzled (to say the least) to hear her novel was being read in such a place, but we like the idea very much.

Categories: Branwell Brontë, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Weirdo