Having lunch where the Brontës sent off their manuscripts

The Yorkshire Post has been to the brand new restaurant in Haworth: The Old Post Office.

It’s a while since I’ve been to Haworth. There’s no disputing its post-industrial, gritty beauty and on a warm early summer evening there’s nowhere finer.

Folk are sitting out eating fish and chips, drinking beer on the church steps and outside the Haworth Steam Brewing Co a happy crowd with dogs are vaping while visitors slog up and down the steep hill instantly recognisable by their unsuitable shoes.

There’s a fair amount of theming, as you’d expect; The Original Brontë Stationery Store and the Cabinet of Curiosities, where Branwell used to score his laudanum, and walking from the car park I think I saw some flats called Wuthering Heights. I might have made that up.

I’m generally not a fan of themed restaurants, but tonight I’m at Haworth Old Post Office, literally where they bought stamps and sent off their manuscripts, so it would be a bit odd if there wasn’t a bit of a Brontë thing going so I’ll cut them some slack.

The original Victorian Post Office counter is the first thing you see, and a handsome chunk of wood it is too.

If you ask nicely they’ll let you open the drawer where there are still coins and stamps. Barely an inch of wall space hasn’t been hung with a portrait of one or another of them, or facsimiles of their tiny books with tiny writing.

But it’s more of a tribute than a museum, and the interior is very pleasing, with beams, open fires, comfy benches and quiet corners.

Owners Mark Carson Graham and Charlie Cowling have spent a couple of years meticulously renovating it, making sure the windows, walls and even the chimney pots are right – and they’ve really pulled it off. (Amanda Wragg)

Exeter Daily invites readers to embrace 'the Beauty of Summer in North Yorkshire'.

Literary Connections: Delve into the literary past and take the same historic tours much as were taken by the Brontë sisters and James Herriot to get a chute of their former homes and the places that nurtured and inspired their immortal works. (Liv Butler)

The Brontës are more West Yorkshire than North Yorkshire, though.

We can't agree with writer Sarah Moss when she claims the following in The Irish Times:

I felt then, in my 20s, as if I’d moved beyond her orbit, as if I could navigate galaxies whose existence she could not guess: post-colonialism, Marxism, deconstruction, New Historicism. I had learned if not quite to look down on the benighted error of the Victorians, at least to cut them down to size and put them in their place.

Jane Eyre was an engaging Cinderella story but, more importantly, it was racist, anti-Catholic and bourgeois, which was what students needed to understand. 

That's definitely not what students need to understand or at least not only that. Jane Eyre is also a woman making her own decisions at a time when women weren't generally allowed to do that. You can't judge, never mind destroy, a book because it was written within the mindframe of its time or because its author had opinions which you personally don't like. What students need to understand is that in the past things were different and many of them wrong, yes, but the good news is that they don't have to absorb all the ideas in a book--they can think for themselves, take from it what they will and try and do better in their own lives.

The Jerusalem Post features the book The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic by Gila Fine, which has an obvious source of inspiration.

In our time of war and pain, grief and loss, Gila Fine’s The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic transports us to a completely different era and place, ideology and concerns. Her wonderful scholarly text reminds us of the simple pleasure of reading and, indeed, rereading familiar texts, and drawing out new meanings that cut to the core of modern identity and contemporary authenticity. 

The title of Fine’s book can be traced to a groundbreaking study of feminist literary criticism from 1979 titled The Madwoman in the Attic, a phrase drawn from Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre. In the novel, Edward Rochester’s wife (real name Bertha Mason) is kept secretly imprisoned in an attic of the house by her husband. 

Professors Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, the authors of the 1979 study, argued that female writers in the 19th century had to contend with what Gilbert and Gubar termed the “paradigmatic polarities” that male writers had imposed upon female characters, that they be either angels or monsters. Though Fine does not mention Gilbert and Gubar, she does reference the “madwoman” of Jane Eyre and connects her to Talmudic stories about women, which were solely crafted by the rabbis, and ostensibly fell prey to the angel-monster binary, with the sages investing in a few other female archetypes as well. (Elliott Malamet)