'But, actually, they did get out quite a bit'

The Yorkshire Post has a chat with Ann Dinsdale and Sharon Wright about their new book Let Me In. The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar.

When we think of the Brontës, typically they might be stomping over wild and windy moors surrounding their home in Haworth - looking out into the world but, nonetheless, confined to their own place in it.

A perception persists that Charlotte, Anne and Emily ‘didn’t get out much’, but two of our foremost experts on this family know it’s not quite so simple.

It is an idea that has manifested because “they are so firmly rooted and associated with Haworth, like snails in a shell,” says Ann Dinsdale, principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the literary family’s former home in the Bradford village.

“It’s that perception. Which has been encouraged by a lot of the biographies that they lived in this isolated parsonage. But, actually, they did get out quite a bit.”

Much of their life away from Haworth did, like any of us, involve the siblings spending plenty of time indoors, where their imaginations could truly run wild.

With that in mind, Ann and journalist Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, have been on a journey of discovery to find these places - some well known, some obscure - and put it into a new book Let Me In: The Brontës in Bricks and Mortar.

They write about the histories of Haworth Old Post Office, the sister’s Thornton birthplace and, of course, the Brontë Parsonage Museum itself, where Ann has worked for more than three decades.

Then there are less-trodden places. “Initially, we were going to cover all the buildings in this country connected with the family, all the domestic buildings,” says Ann.

“We actually drew up a list that I think had about 70 different buildings on it, and we decided quite early on that we were going to have to be selective.

“We couldn’t cover everything and we didn’t want it to be just a catalogue with a bit of information about each property.

"We wanted to tell a story, so we picked out not always the best known buildings, but ones that we thought had got something new to say, really. So I think it’ll be a surprise to some people to find some of the buildings that we’ve actually chosen.”

In fact, it is not in Yorkshire but in Cornwall - Chapel Street, Penzance, to be precise - where the book begins, as it was the birthplace of the siblings’ mother, Maria Brontë (née Branwell).

Mrs Brontë is often “left in the shadows” compared to her husband, Patrick, says Ann, though they did also visit places from his earlier years in Ulster’s County Down.

The co-authors wrote about half of the book each, with Ann focusing mostly on the Yorkshire links and Sharon, who is based in London, taking care of the capital and surrounding areas.

To her dismay, she found that at Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, a 1939 memorial to the sisters was missing the diaereses (dots) over the ‘e’ for Brontë.

But, as The Yorkshire Post reported in September last year, this was something she finally got corrected after 85 years.

Sharon also visited Vanity Fair author William Makepeace Thackeray’s former home in Young Street, Kensington, where Charlotte “went to the dinner party from hell” in 1850, one which resembles passages in her novel Jane Eyre.

Charlotte, says Sharon, “was supposed to be the cabaret - (Thackeray) had lined up all his spiky, socialite friends and she just froze because she was so shy”.

Of course, Yorkshire locations form a significant part of the book and one motivation behind it, they admit, is that it allowed them to be nosy - and their expertise made getting into people’s homes somewhat easier than it might have been.

“We’ve kind of taken advantage of that privileged access that we can get to private houses and homes, and then shared them with other people,” says Ann.

“So I think the book is for anybody that’s got an interest in the Brontës, or if they’re nosy, like me, and love looking around people’s houses.”

The sisters’ birthplace, a terraced house on Market Street in Thornton, Bradford, is now owned by the public after a community campaign.

Ann says: “I was actually one of the trustees on the committee at the time that they acquired the house. So I had that privilege of being able to watch all the renovations happen and hear about things that they discovered about the building on the way.”

Kipping House, the nearby home of Mrs Brontë’s friend Elizabeth Firth, is an example of how important details about the family’s lives are linked to buildings which have endured - even if they are contained in what Sharon calls her “deeply boring diary”.

“We get that idea of not only Mrs Brontë’s life, but the very young Brontë siblings’ life. We know what Patrick got up to, because he was a man and he was a clergyman, and it all got written down. But finding out what those five happy-ish years were like very much involved understanding Kipping.”

Then there was the old Clergy Daughters’ School in Cowan Bridge, just over the border in Lancashire. The older Brontë sisters, Elizabeth and Maria, died of tuberculosis, aged 11 and 10, in 1825. It is thought they caught the infection at the school, which served as the inspiration for the Lowood School in Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.

One of the surviving cottages is now a holiday let, so Ann and Sharon went to stay and, returning a second time with their friend Jane Sellars, former director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum, she declared that “this place oozes Brontë”.

Ann says: “It was quite a spooky house. You always had that fear at night that there’d be little hunched faces peering in at you.”

They also cover Haworth Old Post Office, where the sisters would have posted their manuscripts and letters, and witnessed the renovation of that property, which “was in a quite a derelict state the first time we got to see it and of course, now it’s a thriving cafe bar at the top of Main Street,” says Ann.

Sharon says: “These are not just fusty old places that nobody cares about that are not important anymore.

"They certainly are important because they connect us with our country, connect us with our own literary heritage. They connect us with our own sense of place, and it’s a constant need to sound a battle cry for these places.”

In a chapter called A Lament, Sharon writes ruefully about the ruined state of Lousy Farm, Liversedge, a former home of Patrick.

A cheerier read comes in the form of The Branwell Pub Crawl, an entire section dedicated to the Black Bull and Cross Roads Inn at Haworth, Lord Nelson Inn at Luddenden, and the Old Cock in Halifax.

One building, perhaps above all, is of special interest not only to the authors but to Brontë fans the world over.

Ann says: “Of course, for me the key building is this one, the Parsonage, because I’ve worked here for 36 years now - so I’ve almost been here longer than the Brontës - and I probably know this house better than any other.

"And actually that made it harder, I struggled more with writing the piece on the Parsonage, I think, than the rest of them.”

It is, she says, “difficult to try and decide on what would be interesting to other people”. There is new information in her piece relating to structural changes “which were always thought to have happened, but which we now know didn’t happen”, but she has also treated it like a guided tour, taking the reader around the museum, including personal anecdotes during her time.

Sharon says: “It’s a tour de force and I think readers are going to go straight to that, if I’m honest, because it’s chapter and verse.

"Who’s going to know more and tell you more and explain more about this iconic house across the world than Ann, because she knows every brick, don’t you?”

“Well, I should do, after all of that time,” says Ann. (John Blow)

Perhaps this writer at The Standard should take a look at the book before claiming that,

North Yorkshire, with its windswept heaths and sea-battered cliffs, is the brooding landscape that inspired Emily Brontë’s ‘wild and windy moors’ in Wuthering Heights. While its romantic pull remains, the days of staying in dated guesthouses and crumbling country houses are over. (Annabelle Spranklen)

Emily Brontë was inspired by West Yorkshire, actually.

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