has an article on how you can now visit the Brontë Birthplace in Thornton.
In the early 19th century, three sisters were born in a small house in northern England: Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë. Each one would grow up to become a pivotal figure in English literature, with Charlotte writing Jane Eyre (1847), Emily writing Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne writing The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848).
Now, that house in Bradford, England, where they were born has been restored and reopened to the public as a museum—and soon-to-be hotel.
On May 15, Queen Camilla visited the village of Thornton to open the Brontë Birthplace in an official ceremony. After a year and a half of fundraising and renovations, the house is now a functioning educational center. Come July, its bedrooms will also be open to overnight guests, according to the Guardian’s David Barnett.
“This house is no longer just a place of literary history,” says Katharine Barnett, chair of the Brontë Birthplace, in a statement from the museum. “It is a living, breathing space filled with creativity, education and community pride.”
The novelists’ parents were Patrick and Maria Brontë, an Irish clergyman and a Cornish gentlewoman who married in 1812. They had two daughters, Maria and Elizabeth, before moving to the Thornton house in 1815. Charlotte was born in 1816, Emily in 1818 and Anne in 1820. A brother, Branwell, was also born in 1817.
When Anne was just three months old, Patrick was appointed the reverend of a nearby church, and the family moved to the Haworth parsonage. The two eldest children died soon after, but the younger four children survived. As they grew older, they also thrived as playmates, inventing “invented imaginary worlds together and [writing] about them in tiny books,” per the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
By the mid-19th century, the three sisters were publishing novels under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights would become two of the most renowned books ever written in English.
After the family left the sisters’ birthplace, the building was repurposed several times. It has served as a butcher’s shop and a cafe, which shuttered during the pandemic, according to the Guardian. With the building up for grabs, a group of advocates—including journalist Christa Ackroyd and Brontë relative Nigel West—raised the £650,000 (more than $700,000) needed to purchase and renovate it. (Sonja Anderson)
Did you know Vienna was a monster when you wrote it?
We knew it was good, yeah, but it went against every rule in the “making a single” rule book. It was slow. It was meandering. It speeds up. It’s got a viola solo in the middle of a synthesised thing. It’s four minutes long.
What were the chances of getting that on the radio? None. I mean, none. It was a fluke. It was luck. That was nothing to do with us. We made it. Someone else got it on the radio for us.
When the record label wanted to put it out, they wanted to edit it down to three minutes. And we just said we’d rather not put it out. We just didn’t want this thing that we’d created to be chopped up in order to get out to the general public.
They ended up putting it out in its entirety. It was just one of those Wuthering Heights, Bohemian Rhapsody moments, where it didn’t matter how long it was, because once people heard that, it did something to them. (Richard Murphy)
The Mirror (US edition) reports that Goodreads has listed the top 100 books released every year in the last century, and
Wide Sargasso Sea is the top book for 1966.
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