has travelled to Brontë Country and written all about it.
Ghosts are a prominent theme in the Brontë sisters’ work, so perhaps it’s fitting that my first evening in their birthplace is spent listening for creaks on the staircase. Like Jane Eyre lying awake in Thornfield Hall, it’s almost too easy to visualise spirits lurking somewhere in the shadows beyond my phone charger.
I am lucky enough to spend two nights at Brontë Birthplace, the character homestay in Thornton, located on the western edges of Bradford. The restored Georgian home also doubles as a museum and cafe. Once the home of Patrick and Maria Brontë, the sisters and their brother Patrick Branwell are thought to have all been born here before the family moved to Haworth in 1820.
Anna and Mark, the custodians of the property and passionate history buffs, greet guests with infectious energy. Painstaking effort has been put into furnishing the space with genuine antiques, including a four-poster bed, chaise lounge, and a chamber pot discreetly tucked under the bed. Mark gently asks me not to use it, and I very considerately oblige.
My tour of the birthplace is full of the kind of detail that collapses the space between history and adaptation. A life-size cut-out of Jacob Elordi has become a particular favourite of Mark’s, he explains. Hidden behind doors, the 6′4 heartthrob is perfect for startling unsuspecting guests - an apparition many would perhaps long to encounter at the end of a dark corridor.
At curry house El Manzil, a few doors down, I marvel at the unique ways locals have reinvented the family’s legacy. Anna had described the sisters as “yassified”, and looking at their affectionately irreverent depictions on the menu, I’m inclined to agree.
Located 10km northwest of Thornton is Haworth. Shrouded in a careful negotiation between Gothic romanticism and ordinary village life. In describing the town as quaint, I risk underselling it. The cobblestone streets and preserved shopfronts are both atmospheric and startlingly lived-in.
On a springtime Saturday morning, it’s bustling with day-trippers and locals in hair rollers, and a craft fair is being held in the old parsonage. I buy a merino beret and gloves for £13 (NZ$30) in a vague attempt to look as though I belong here, to no avail.
The Brontë Parsonage Museum is meticulously laid out with artifacts and scholarship in every room, each object arranged with a care that humanises three women who have become mythic figures.
Unique exhibitions, like Layla Khoo’s recreation of the manuscript for Wuthering Heights, showcase the collective storytelling that keeps their memory alive. Each sentence of the novel is in the hand of a different person who felt tethered to someone long dead, an example of how literature builds an unlikely intimacy between strangers.The cemetery next to the parsonage has an eerie kind of beauty, the headstones unevenly reclaimed by the earth. Several members of the family are buried in a vault beneath St Michael and All Angel’s Church, below where patriarch Patrick would have given sermons to the village.
Lunch at the Haworth Old Post Office is a highlight, offering refined dining in a building that still feels somewhat like it has letters to sort. The original counter has been kept, and the owners are kind enough to show me the Victorian cash drawer; its century-old compartments still intact.
Salomon’s weren’t launched until 1947, so I set off in boots and a long skirt to maintain historical accuracy. Trudging along through the brush, the idea wanes slightly in romanticism, replaced by the more immediate feeling that Victorian women were much hardier than I, and probably cold most of the time.
For Kiwis, the scenery of the north is not altogether unfamiliar: sloping banks of green teem with livestock, patchwork farmland that at times resembles Waikato. But this, of course, doesn’t make the moorland any less breathtaking.
Mossy, jagged rocks and dry-stone walls cut through the hillsides, some engraved with words that aren’t fit for publication. It somehow deepens the historic character of the whole walk, like the landscape itself has become an archive over time.
The Keighley and Worth Railway offers its own panoramic views of the countryside, the standing corridors packed with visitors jostling for the best window position. As we loop around, trackside onlookers film the vintage carriage, a continuation of the British infatuation with trains, I find both endearing and inexplicable.
Later that evening, I indulge another English obsession - Spain - by ordering a tapas selection at Pave, where locals balance sangrias al fresco. People pass and chat throughout the village, the narrow streets assuming renewed energy as dusk falls.
Parting with the birthplace itself is more difficult than I expected, despite a fair few more bumps in the night. I get the sense I, like so many before me, have left my own mark here without even realising it. (Imogene Bedford)
Perhaps having a high schooler and feeling slightly nostalgic is what has pulled me back, this summer, to those days of summer reading assignments – and not just any reading, but specifically mid-to-late 19th-century literature.
What I’ve found is that there’s something really special about reading, with grown-up eyes, the same pieces of literature I was assigned as a teenager. I have the same copy of "Jane Eyre" that was mine in 1999, and have found myself equally impressed and embarrassed by some of the notes 15-year-old Abbey wrote in the margins: “Why don’t they just get together?!?”
I see things now that I did not before: what my 15-year-old self would have classified as stubbornness in a character, my 41-year-old self deeply admires as strength; what my 15-year-old self blindly accepted as true love, my 41-year-old self questions as a possible lapse in judgement but also allows for different societal norms.
I read “Wuthering Heights” for the first time because it somehow bypassed me three decades ago, and to be honest, I didn’t love it. (Can I say that?) But I’m glad to be able to check it off my “To Be Read” list.
Regardless of questionable familial relationships and flawed heroes, I’ve come to appreciate century-old literature for the way it makes me think, the way it takes time for me to flip a switch in my brain that takes me from 2026 to 1840-something. (Abbey Roy)
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