Haworth
Our excitement as we neared Haworth had in it an element of suspense that was really painful, as though we were to meet some long-separated friend, who might have changed in the interval—so clear an image of Haworth had we from print and picture.1
—Virginia Woolf, 1904
When I first discussed the possibility of a trip to Haworth with Eric, he was eager to come along. As the trip got closer, he was less sure—he was afraid he’d be in my way, that he’d distract from my experience, that because he didn’t love the Brontës as I love the Brontës, I would be less able to immerse myself in Haworth and its history. Possibly he was worried I’d run mad on the moors and leave him stranded without the cultural familiarity to navigate home. “Don’t be ridiculous, you’re half the point of going,” I told him, before making him watch the five-hour BBC Jane Eyre. He had the good sense to pretend he liked it very much, whether he did or not.
Thanks to the Brontës, I had begun to learn how to share my life (and what’s more, my actual life, not merely an elaborate performance of a well-behaved one). He had to be there. My mission was as simple as it had always been—to get as close to Charlotte Brontë and her family as possible, to see what could only be seen from standing where they stood. We began our trip in London, where we would spend three days before going on to Yorkshire. Fortunately for us, on their first trips to London, Charlotte and Anne were as much tourists as anyone else, flocking to landmarks like St. Paul’s and Winchester Cathedral; we got the best of old and new London as we followed their footsteps. As Charlotte later wrote in Villette,
Elation and pleasure were in my heart: to walk alone in London seemed of itself an adventure.…
… I went wandering whither chance might lead, in a still ecstasy of freedom and enjoyment; and I got—I know not how—I got into the heart of city life. I saw and felt London at last: I got into the Strand; I went up Cornhill; I mixed with the life passing along; I dared the perils of crossings. To do this, and to do it utterly alone, gave me, perhaps an irrational, but a real pleasure. Since those days, I have seen the West End, the parks, the fine squares; but I love the city far better. The city seems so much more in earnest: its business, its rush, its roar, are such serious things, sights, and sounds. The city is getting its living—the West End but enjoying its pleasure. At the West End you may be amused, but in the city you are deeply excited.2
We saw where Charlotte and Anne would have stayed in Paternoster Square, where they first met George Smith on Waterloo Place, and we heard the bells she would have heard when we woke up on our first morning there—they drew us straight to St. Paul’s Cathedral, just like they did for Lucy Snowe:
When I awoke, rose, and opened my curtain, I saw the risen sun struggling through fog. Above my head, above the house-tops, co-elevate almost with the clouds, I saw a solemn, orbed mass, dark blue and dim—THE DOME. While I looked, my inner self moved; my spirit shook its always-fettered wings half loose; I had a sudden feeling as if I, who never yet truly lived, were at last about to taste life.…
Prodigious was the amount of life I lived that morning. Finding myself before St. Paul’s, I went in; I mounted to the dome.3
The front steps of St. Paul’s are bustling, the steps crowded with tourists and the streets with buses and taxis. Though the dome is an impressive sight from all over London, right at the cathedral’s base it becomes hardly noticeable. Once inside, in awe of the cathedral’s size and spectacle, the ornate marble and bronze decorations, I stopped by a particularly impressive monument in the nave featuring a man on a horse surrounded by ornamentation and pomp. “I wonder how I’d have to live my life to get this kind of memorial,” I said irreverently, before walking around to the side with the subject’s name etched into it. It was Lord Wellington. Charlotte’s personal hero and secular patron saint.
And then, on the left side of the nave as I approached the altar, there were plaques commemorating World War I veterans. On one of them, I saw my last name, “Pennington,” etched in neat capitals. Then I gasped. Four rows above it was “Eyre.”
We decided to climb all the way to the topmost gallery of the dome. It was a scary, anxious undertaking, walking up marble steps, then stone steps, and finally ascending narrow spiral iron staircases, teetering between the inner dome and the outer one. I kept repeating, “If Charlotte could do this, with no arch support and no immune system, so can I.” I could imagine the headlines the following day—Brontë Enthusiast Plunges to Death, Punctures Hole in Ceiling of Cathedral That Survived the Blitz.
The climb was worth it. The views from each of the overlooks are breathtaking. As Charlotte (who was notoriously nearsighted) put it in Villette,
I saw thence London, with its river, and its bridges, and its churches; I saw antique Westminster, and the green Temple Gardens, with sun upon them, and a glad, blue sky, of early spring above; and between them and it, not too dense, a cloud of haze.4
We made our way back down and ventured out into the city. I fell in love with London immediately—the Thames, the cabs, the bridges, the innumerable “on this spot stood something designed by Christopher Wren that was destroyed in the great fire” signs and the quirky alleys everywhere. A great many fish and chips were consumed, along with large quantities of fizzy lemonade and tea. After two days of acclimation (and the progression of my terrible fake accent through every act of My Fair Lady) we were ready to follow Charlotte back to the Parsonage.
We arrived in Haworth, that “lonely, quiet spot, buried away from the world,” the way Charlotte Brontë might have returned to it—a train ride from London to Leeds, then a shorter train ride to Keighley (pronounced, I now know, with a sort of ich-laut, tapping the tongue on the roof of the mouth as you pass over the gh). We watched the sun get lower over the beautiful countryside from the train windows, nudging each other to point out church spires and anything that looked like a castle. By the time we alighted at Keighley, it was dark and we could only see the gray stone buildings where they were lit by street lamps, following the narrow road up out of the Worth Valley and into the village of Haworth. We took a cab; the Brontës would have taken a one-horse trap cart, or, horrors, walked the remaining four miles. Our cabbie asked if we’d been there before, and when I said no, he asked “Home to see the sisters?” and I said yes. Home to see the sisters. If I stopped to mention every time I cried on this trip, it would double the length of the chapter, so just assume I perpetually had the vapors.
We passed by some of the fearful tourist Brontë-exploitation I’d been afraid of: a Brontë laundromat, an apartment building called “Thornfield,” a coffee shop called “Villette,” a store called “Eyres and Graces.” I thought, “I am coming here to Haworth on my knees—there is no need to sell the Brontës to me,” accompanied by a flash of irritation that anybody needs to have the Brontës sold to them. We passed a railway station, then what looked like an old factory with a “cars for hire” sign on it, and at last turned onto a bumpy, narrow cobblestone road, so steep we were pressed back into our seats. I was surprised the little cab’s engine was able to move us upward, the grade was so extreme. “This is Main Street,” the cabbie announced, and we peered out our respective windows at the small shops and pubs that lined it.
He pulled over in front of our lodgings, the Apothecary Guest. Next door, Rose and Co., which had been a real apothecary back in the Brontës’ day (that sold Branwell real opium), now sold kitschy soaps and candy. We rang the bell, fearful suddenly that we were about to find ourselves in a Poe novel, but Nic, the smiling proprietor, opened the door, took my suitcase, and led us up some narrow stairs. Our room had a copy of Branwell’s famous portrait of his sisters on the wall, with Branwell misguidedly painted back in. After a moment of delighting over the old-fashioned lock and key, we ventured back out onto the dark, misty streets of Haworth, heart of Shirley Country and nexus of the Brontë universe. I would have knelt to kiss the cobblestones, but it occurred to me that for all it was two hundred years later, public hygiene probably wasn’t quite improved enough for that.
In 2012, Daphne Merkin wrote for the New York Times Magazine that “there is always the hope that whatever led the Brontës to pull great books out of themselves might work again if one only entrusted oneself to the same brooding surroundings.”5 Even the most pragmatic of earlier visitors, who commented rather harshly on the manners of their tour guides, were unable to resist mentally reviving the sisters. We just can’t help ourselves. In 1861, American Charles Hale visited during the renovation of the Parsonage, following the departure of Arthur Bell Nicholls. He pilfered Patrick Brontë’s bellpull, and purchased a window sash from Charlotte’s bedroom and purloined some of the panes. He wanted pieces of the Parsonage to frame other pieces of the Parsonage. But this is grisly souvenir-seeking; this is not the act of a man on pilgrimage.6
Many have written about what readers and writers seek when they visit the homes of their heroines and heroes. Virginia Woolf’s first piece of published writing was a recollection of a visit to Haworth in 1904, in which she remarked it was better to stay home and read the books themselves than to undertake sentimental journeys to famous doorsteps.7 I both understand and object to her argument. Of course we get a jolt of contact when we read the Brontës’ work, no matter where we are, and certainly, we are deluded about the power of place. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to it. We want to feel close to them. To imagine they feel close to us. To sense their presence. We think we’ll know them better, we’ll see the work more clearly, we’ll become touched by greatness ourselves. Perhaps we just want to say, “Thank you, thank you for what you did and I’m sorry about the consumption and so, so grateful for your life and your work.” And what’s wrong with the sentimental journey anyway—not just for the Brontë-seekers, but for devotees of any author who has touched readers deeply?
We passed the Black Bull on our left, where Branwell used to regale his fans and neighbors with drunken exploits, glanced down to the White Lion on our right, then turned left at the Kings Arms and realized we were facing the side of the Haworth church. A few steps farther and we were standing alongside the graveyard, which meant the illuminated building up ahead could only be the Parsonage. That Parsonage. My eyes filled with urgent tears and then I sobbed. Three days of imagining “Charlotte Brontë visited near here and would have seen this, not precisely these buildings, but definitely something similar to this” in London gave way to a true and absolute certainty that “she was here, she walked here, she saw this. This is all real. This is where she is.”
The Parsonage faces the church, with the graveyard spread in between and crawling around to the left. A stone wall runs the length of the graveyard and encloses a small front lawn; an iron gate admits visitors, and over it hangs an ironwork sign of a woman at a desk, writing. Behind the Parsonage is the ticket office and the inevitable gift shop, and beyond are the moors, invisible in the darkness. We stood quietly for a few more minutes. The house seemed smaller than I had imagined, though it was at least as big as my childhood home, which only ever had to contain two children. I imagined teleporting through the walls, and being alone with the Brontë relics I knew were there.
We walked back down the darkened lane. My eyes were still streaming. It felt exactly right. Gloomy and still and so beautiful. I could see why Elizabeth Gaskell had given into the impulse of mythmaking. The damp grass and dead leaves of the graveyard made a more picturesque backdrop for the Brontës’ Gothic tales than the daffodils impudently nodding in barrels below the church windows. Much of Haworth shuts down on weeknights, since the tourist traffic is less active in the off-season, so we felt lucky to find a restaurant that was still open for a late dinner. Afterward, back in our bedroom, as I was imagining how it would be to knock on the Parsonage door and take Charlotte Brontë’s tiny hand into my own, the adrenaline wore off and I fell asleep.
WHEN we woke up the next morning, Eric was decidedly unwell. He’d complained of a sore throat in London but we had both chalked it up to plane germs and London fog. My vision of the morning’s events (a triumphant return to the Parsonage, where the ghosts of the Brontë sisters would offer me tea in the dining room and keep me company while I researched, answering all my questions with wit and good humor) had to be set aside. I set off in pursuit of over-the-counter remedies, and when the Rose & Co. apothecary was no help (damn you kitschy soaps!), I hiked all the way down the impossibly steep hill in a misting rain to the nearest grocery.
I tried to balance concern for Eric’s health with frustration over the way this once-in-a-lifetime trip was being disrupted and the physical discomfort of seriously, the steepest hill ever. Suddenly I felt calm descend. What could bring me closer to the Brontës of Haworth than having my creative fulfillment compromised by the illness of a loved one? Now I, too, would experience the straight-up inconvenience of Yorkshire-induced ailments. I might even have the opportunity to triumph over adversity before, regretfully, succumbing to the sore throat and body aches my beloved was currently enduring. Would they bury me in Haworth!? Would I win some sort of most dedicated tourist award? Could this even make me an honorary sister? Things were looking up.
At last, the hill conquered (it was a million times worse to ascend, by the way), and Eric dosed with ibuprofen and breakfast, he felt well enough to come with me to the Parsonage. A breathless, jumpy feeling overtook me as we got our tickets and walked to the front of the building. Running narration dogged my every step. I am in Charlotte Brontë’s yard. I am on her steps. That is her door. She heard those hinges squeak. This was her foyer. This is it, this is her floor. This wall I am not supposed to be touching was her wall. Her skirt brushed this doorway. I gazed into the Brontës’ dining room, decorated as it would have been in the 1850s, after Charlotte put red curtains over the windows and hung portraits of Thackeray and Wellington on the walls. I ran my eyes over the blur of Patrick’s study, the kitchen, Arthur Nicholls’ study. Then up the stairs (she stepped on this step and held the bannister maybe here or maybe here), passing the grandfather clock on the landing. I glanced into the servants’ bedroom, then Patrick’s bedroom, outfitted to match a sketch Branwell had done in which Death loomed over him in bed;* then the nursery, which had been made smaller when Charlotte expanded the master bedroom next door. There are pencil sketches and doodles on the wall that may have been done by the Brontë children. Branwell’s studio was renovated by the curate who came after the Brontës, and now contains an exhibition of Brontëana.
Finally I stepped into the room that Patrick and Maria had shared, where Charlotte and Arthur had slept after their marriage, and where Charlotte had finally died. It wasn’t furnished like a bedroom; instead, it held display cases of trinkets and treasures, personal items that had touched Charlotte’s hands. The ceiling was low and the wooden floor creaked as I stepped gingerly around the room. The central case held a silk dress on a mannequin, so if you glanced out of the corner of your eye it looked like one of the sisters was standing there, headless. Charlotte’s wedding bonnet sat beside it, doing nothing to dispel the illusion. Her botanical pictures lined the walls. Pamphlets from the Great Exhibition, which she’d visited several times, and Aunt Elizabeth Branwell’s glasses, and pairs of impossibly tiny lace gloves were dimly illuminated under glass. And I felt nothing.
For the first time since setting foot in Haworth I didn’t have an emotional reaction. Maybe I’d done too much research—I recognized nearly everything from pictures I’d seen. For a while that headless silk dress had been my cell phone’s wallpaper. Or maybe the exhibits made the bedroom feel too far removed from its previous life. Other people, the Reverend Wade and his family and subsequent caretakers, slept and woke and lived in it after Charlotte did, and now it felt the most like a museum of any room in the house. The dining room, I fancied, held more of Charlotte’s creative energy, or the kitchen that, though renovated, still looked as though the Brontës might have just stepped out of it.
I was shown into the research library (which meant crossing the velvet rope and getting to walk through the Brontës’ kitchen!), where the library and collections officer had laid out some of the Brontës’ own books for me. I slipped on a pair of white cotton gloves and dove into their copy of Goldsmith’s Geography. Charlotte signed her name twice on its inside cover and filled the flyleaves with sketches and doodles. She, or Emily or Anne, added their place names to the index (Gondal, and perhaps Glass Town?).
I was filled with love and affection for her. This is the whole point of primary research—to be surprised and delighted by things you can only discover in person. Geography showed me how she came to learn about far-off places, and how she felt she could know them despite not having traveled there. In addition to short narrative descriptions, the book features illustrations of cities and clothing, invokes poets to describe the scenery when appropriate, and includes editorial observations to enliven what might otherwise have been a fairly dry recounting of people and places. It makes total sense she and her siblings would have been interested in establishing their own countries and making games out of historical figures—these were their toys.
Figure 14.1: Doodles in the flyleaf of Goldsmith’s Geography.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BRONTË PARSONAGE MUSEUM.
Why does Charlotte Brontë come to life in the pages of a little geography book she doodled on and not in the very room she died in? Virginia Woolf said, referring to the clothing on display, that it was because “the natural fate of such things is to die before the body that wore them, and because these, trifling and transient though they are, have survived, Charlotte Brontë the woman comes to life, and one forgets the chiefly memorable fact that she was a great writer.”8 When Charlotte doodled in that little book, and Anne annotated its index, they gave it pieces of themselves that still endure, not as Great Writers, but as curious, engaged young girls. I’m touching something Charlotte touched, bracing it with my hands where she might have held it, as she sketched a fine lady in a long gown. Nobody has repapered over the book or moved its furnishings around. They didn’t have to reconstruct it from their best period estimates. It was already here. Charlotte drew her thoughts and when I look at them, I see what she was thinking, and thus she is alive again for a moment.
When I stand where she stood, hold what she held, and hear things she might have heard (the gusting wind on the moors, for example) I can almost forget there are no living reminders of Charlotte Brontë left. Or that none of us have the luxury of leaving our actual selves behind, outside the pages of our books or the canvas of our artwork. People left graffiti on the staircase of St. Paul’s to make their mark, so we know they were there. And sometimes that’s as permanent a memento as we can hope for.
For the preservation of Haworth we have the hard work of the Brontë Society to thank. It was formed in 1893 and immediately became responsible for obtaining and preserving every scrap of Brontëana that it could get. Its first president was the Right Honorable Earl (later Marquess) of Crewe, Robert Offley Ashburton Crewe-Milnes.9 The collection became the largest in the world upon the sudden death of collector and publisher Henry Houston Bonnell, who bequeathed to the museum his extensive collection of Brontë manuscripts, letters, first editions, and personal effects in 1926.
There is an amazing body of scholarly work in the Society’s transactions, essays, research, and transcriptions of first-person accounts. My favorites are the narratives from early visitors to Haworth, who came to visit while Arthur Nicholls and Patrick Brontë were still alive. Everyone talks about those hills. The lucky ones sat in the Haworth church to hear Patrick or Arthur preach, and a few were invited into the Parsonage to talk to Patrick afterward. Their accounts of the village’s grimness and its surroundings are generally pretty dramatic, though some do acknowledge it was pretty in summer. People seem to have the hardest time believing the Brontë children could ever have been cheerful. Even though I get to see Brontë relics too, how jealous I am of all the early Brontë fanatics who got to hear stories directly and handle all the mementos themselves, sitting in the kitchens and parlors of neighbors. They got to speak with maids at the Black Bull and sextons to whom Branwell owed money, and shopkeepers who sold the Brontës their paper.
When I’d absorbed as much Brontë communion as I could take for one day, I went back to the guesthouse to check on Eric. He felt like his throat was closing up and it was becoming difficult to swallow. I spoke with our host, feeling fairly confident leeches weren’t still Haworth’s best option for medicine, and he directed us to a “surgery” just around the corner. I felt worried until I realized “surgery” is the British word for clinic. The doctor there sent us to a specialist at the Bradford Royal Infirmary because he was afraid Eric’s throat ailment was quinsy. This was hard to hear, but it felt great to say it in my fake British accent, because we don’t have “Royal Infirmaries” in America and nobody gets quinsy (KWIN-zay) anymore. I felt a pit of dread in my stomach when he told us to look for the “casualty unit,” until I found out it was British for “emergency room.”
We took a cab to Bradford, the next town over, which is a thriving metropolis compared to quiet, hilly Haworth. I spent a lot of the ride reassuring Eric that quinsy almost never needed surgery (it often does) and that it had absolutely not killed George Washington (it definitely did). On a positive note, we got to see Yorkshire countryside we’d never have seen without a visit to the hospital. A miserable evening on the ENT ward later, Eric was diagnosed with tonsillitis and sent home with antibiotics and baby Tylenol, since the pharmacy was closed and they wanted us to at least have something to get through the night with. Bless you, socialized medicine.
OUR second day in Haworth, Eric was still in pain and elected to stay in bed. I had a stroll through the freezing church, which was unlocked and only inhabited by a long-haired black cat, who’d taken up residence on a fifty-pence book table near the entrance. I saw the Brontë memorial marble plaque, which had been preserved from the original church. Even if it was for space reasons, I’m miffed that Branwell gets his own line. Anne is the only missing member, as she was buried at Scarborough.
Charlotte’s pew is long gone, and the reconstruction pews aren’t nearly as quaint. There were a variety of postcards and photos for sale, surrounded by disheartening pleas for financial support. I dropped a pound coin in the box and petted the cat gingerly; it felt like I quite had Brontë Country to myself for the morning.
Eric’s throat was even more swollen when I finished reading Goldsmith’s Geography, which blithely asserted that calf-sized American elephants could be found in the New World, and Brontë Society Transactions for the afternoon, so back to Bradford we went, to see a doctor, who teased us for giving Eric’s weight in pounds (“Don’t you speak proper English?” he asked dryly. “Is it… stones?” I said, tentatively. “Kilograms,” he replied, with playful disdain. Even my medical references are from outdated literature). Then he gave Eric steroids to reduce the swelling so the antibiotics could do their work.
It was a characteristically Haworthian day, gray and cloudy with occasional rain. The grimness of the landscape seeped into my imagination and I envisioned the glorious misery of a plane ride home alone to explain that Eric had caught a case of the Brontës and perished on Haworth moor. Amazingly, two hours after taking his first dose of steroids Eric sat up, announced he was hungry, and ate all of our remaining rolls (pronounced tea cakes). The next morning he woke up before I did, still ravenous. Modern medicine had worked its magic, the sun had burnt off the fog, and I was quite happy to say goodbye to that particular realm of Brontë overidentification.
MY third day, I dove into the Blackwoods magazines, starting with 1825, when Charlotte was nine. These are the magazines on which she and Branwell based their own hand-sewn versions. I found evidence of articles and stories she certainly must have read—the burning of Indian widows; folktales with brownies, fairies, and witches; essays about the life of the Duke of Wellington. There was advice for bachelors and unmarried women, a great deal of satire, poetry, history, dispatches from all over the British Empire, open letters to the editor, political essays, debates on women’s rights, and brief installments of novels and plays. The bound-up editions of the actual magazines I got to read aren’t the Brontës’ own copies, but they live on the bookshelves in the Brontës’ dining room. Now that I’ve read their source material, I can see how precise the Brontës’ imitations were, and better appreciate their adoption of so many editorial “voices” at such young ages. At two, my now “usual” quitting time, Eric met me at the Parsonage and we had a quick lunch before the unlikely beauty of a sunny day in Yorkshire beckoned us onto the moors.
Our walk was glorious. The relief at Eric’s recovery combined with the splendidness of the weather and the unspeakable wonder of the landscape. If seeing the Brontës’ London felt like ringing a little bell inside my ribcage, gazing out on their moors was like striking a gong the size of my whole body. Every Brontë acolyte who’s ever come this way has done exactly as we did—crossed the churchyard and turned right into the narrow walled-in lane, reached the moors, and decided whether to make for Top Withens or Stanbury or the Brontë Waterfall. I began as a waterfall skeptic, since it sounded like touristy nonsense, but then I found an account by Ellen Nussey of a day trip to Haworth in which the sisters did take her on a long walk. They had idled away the afternoon, in fact, by a waterfall. We walked and exclaimed and walked some more.
I took a sprig of heather to tuck in my journal (an homage to the one Charlotte allegedly carried in to Emily during her last weakening days). There were stone walls and grassy fields all around, and the view stretched down and away for miles and miles. The colors went from ruddy brown to bright green and faded yellow across the landscape. We passed small farmhouses and scattered flocks of sheep, grazing and napping in the sun next to their lambs. When we crossed over the road from Stanbury we came upon a large group of rams munching grass together, staring at us with their keyhole-shaped pupils.
Every time we passed a halfway passable pool of water we wondered if we’d reached the “meeting of the waters,” and debated turning back. Eventually we were rewarded for our perseverance when the path became stonier and the stones became steps and the moors bent into a seam, out of which burbled quick-flowing water. If you ever make this journey yourself, just trust me and keep going. When you find it, you’ll know. It is not vague or subtle. Just like everything else about the Brontës, their waterfall is emphatic and deliberate and unmistakable. The Brontës would have crossed the stream with stepping stones, but the Brontë Society has placed a bridge there for pilgrims to use. We walked as close to the water’s source as we could in unsteady shoes, and I kept an eye out for ghosts. Unfortunately, only another hiker and his two spaniels, presumably mortal, made their presence known.
When I was a kid, visiting relatives in rural Arkansas or woodsy Connecticut, I’d occasionally enjoyed a walk out into the flat grass-filled plains or the hilly forests around their houses. I liked the outdoors as a concept, as a view from a cabin window or from the top of a moderate hill near the parked car that had driven me there. But I had never seen anything like this. The mossy stones, the villages that looked like train-set models, the farmhouses set apart from their neighbors. There was nothing I saw that I did not love immediately. If I could, I would have opened my eyes wider, let them take over my whole face just to see more of West Yorkshire at a time.
The only difficulty in the whole day was the wind, which was always present and at times quite, well, wuthering. But despite that—or more likely because of it—we had a remarkable day that felt like it was sent just for us (the ultimate delusion of pilgrims to well-traveled historical sites). I have never been so sad to leave a place as I was to go back inside after being on those moors. No wonder Emily Brontë sickened to be away from them. No wonder Charlotte devoted whole passages of Shirley just to landscape rhapsody. No wonder none of them could be happy cooped up in a city or confined to a nursery caring for someone else’s children. They knew what real liberty felt like, and no alternative would ever be worthwhile as long as this awaited them at home.
OUR last two days in Haworth were overcast—ideal for research, as if the moors didn’t want me to overdose. The next morning the Parsonage employee at the admissions desk greeted me like a regular. I spent the day immersed in books on the Brontës, their education, and the significance of their artwork. I mined their letters for references to Blackwoods and any other publications I would be able to track down back home. It was damp and rainy, but it was also Thursday, so some of the shops that had been closed all week were finally open. Eric and I made the best of it and shopped along Main Street with sodden feet.
Our last morning in Haworth, I started my day in the graveyard. I have always loved cemeteries, never found them scary or ominous. My cat friend, Oscar, who I heard sometimes slips into the Parsonage and tries to lay on the beds, came to say hello. I stopped by the graves of Tabby and the Browns, friends of the family who also worked for the Brontës, who were now buried close to the churchyard wall. Oscar and I wandered around together, noting big families and odd surnames and unusual memorials. Many of the interred would have known the Brontës, and some still have family ties in the village. A man walked by while I stood near the railing at the front and said, “You’d nought have been standing the’ las’ night—it was slashing down ’ere, and I came by an’ back thro’ it and wondered why I’d ever gon’ out,” in a Yorkshire accent so delicious and thick that every word had either half or twice the usual number of syllables. There was actually a time delay while I worked out what he’d said. It made me think of an early visitor to Haworth, who’d said after a similar encounter in 1877, “I… could have hugged the good woman for allowing me to hear it in Yorkshire air.”10
Then I walked down the footpath toward Haworth moor, which we hadn’t visited on our perfect day on Penistone Hill. The morning was sunny and clear and cold. I could see the shadows of clouds moving over the fields in the valley. To my left and up the hill were several ewes with their lambs, frolicking on the green or sleeping in the sun. To my right was a row of cottages just waking up, starting the day with this view. The Brontës’ ability to evoke the moors so vividly seems all the more impressive when you consider how the scenery brings even the most verbose outsider to an awed sort of stillness. At last, I turned back to the Parsonage, and was pleased to see Oscar padding over to say goodbye. I scratched behind his ears, pulled some leaves from his tail, and watched him saunter off on whatever cat business took him on his way.*
Eventually I had to go inside and take my seat for the last time. I’d saved the best for last—three of the surviving tiny Young Men’s Magazines handcrafted by Branwell and Charlotte. The librarians had laid them out on a cushion for me. Not facsimiles, not transcriptions, not copies, but the little manuscripts themselves, even smaller than I’d anticipated. I dramatically opened the folder in which they sat, anticlimactically catalogued in plastic bags. I’d expected to be blown away by their intricacy, but for all their imitative fidelity, these tiny paper booklets were clearly made by the hands of children (albeit precocious ones). I pulled on cotton gloves and figured out how to brace them in my fingers so I could read with a magnifying glass and take notes. If it weren’t for my gloves, our fingerprints might have lined up in that moment.
The first magazine I opened began with a narrative of walking in a country landscape much like the one we had roamed over a day ago. I transcribed most of the first little book, dated August of 1830, chuckling over the silliness of Captain Tree and Stumps, marveling at the versatility of Charlotte’s wit and imagination. Upon reaching the end, I had a brief thrilling moment, wondering if I could possibly be one of the first people to sit there and puzzle out these particular tiny manuscript books. Then a reference in my edition of selected juvenilia led me to an entire collection of The Early Writing of Charlotte Brontë, where the magazine I’d just transcribed and half a dozen more were reprinted. Still. I bet not many people have sat here and done it by hand, taking the time to decipher a confusing misspelling or an archaic turn of phrase. Or maybe everyone who visits does—Would that really make it less of a miracle?
I found in the end that Eric didn’t distract me at all, though his hospital visits certainly escalated the verisimilitude. Without him, I wouldn’t have gotten to see the Royal Infirmary, which was at least as exciting as it was frightening. I wouldn’t have enjoyed the moors so completely, because I would have been constantly wishing he was there to see them too. On our trip and in our lives together, he helps me make room for everything I want to do and see, and keeps me from rushing through it. He’s also good for making sure I stop and eat occasionally.
Realizing we could get one more full day in London if we left Haworth early, we packed our things and changed our train tickets to Friday night, instead of Saturday as initially planned. Back in London, we got to see Buckingham Palace deserted under a full moon, and the next morning, St. James’s Park and its daffodils and at least four different species of ducks. We rode the Eye and basked in its panoramic views, and heard Big Ben toll a final time before we headed to the airport. I researched holiday rentals and tried to figure out how I could ever afford to come back. I imagined taking a room for a month or two to write and visit the moors and pester the librarians with questions about the Brontës’ bank balances, thinking, “I could truly be happy here!”
But by the time I took my seat on the plane to New York, I was wondering how true that was—Could I be happy someplace so quiet? Maybe it’s the effect of so many childhood moves, but I always want to stay someplace long enough to feel comfortable. It rarely occurs to me that I’d eventually get bored. I’d miss going to movies in the middle of the night, the satisfaction of living somewhere the world thinks of as a global capital. But on the other hand? I could be Charlotte Brontë’s neighbor. I could walk my dog on the moors with Emily’s ghost. As a member of the Brontë Society, I can visit the museum every single day if I want to. I could come to know their dining room better than my own. I could read every single piece of Brontë material in the catalogue—and still not have seen it all, because there are Brontë collections in Austin, in Boston, in Buffalo, and New York. I’m comforted by the knowledge that there are still plenty of Brontë fragments for me to pore over, housed in libraries and even private collections. Charlotte was at work on a novel called Emma when she died—Thackeray published it in Cornhill with a eulogy he wrote himself a few months later. There may still be undiscovered pieces out there somewhere in Charlotte’s tiny, usually precise, but occasionally careless hand.
Since our trip, I’ve visited the manuscripts at the Morgan Library and Museum downtown, a fitting palatial home for such treasures. One afternoon I went to Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library to see a box of Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s effects—she was a Brontë Society president who wrote introductions for new editions of all the Brontë novels in 1905. A few weeks later at the Strand I found those editions of Shirley and Villette—it felt like I was enmeshed in a Brontë constellation, as if I had found my place in their orbit.
Sometimes it feels like my whole life has been coherently pointing in this direction. Just as liking led to love and reading one book led to another, being a huge dork led to a life wrapped in literature, art, history, languages. And, finally, to Haworth itself, where I wipe away tears with the back of my hand because this, this is as close as I can get. I know how Charlotte Brontë sounded on paper as a child, as a young girl, as a woman. I know who her hero was and where he is buried. I know what she might have seen when she woke up in London on a morning in March. I know which imaginary places Anne felt were important enough to record in her geography book. I know what her neat, tidy stitches looked like. I’ve seen the kitchen where Emily studied German and the front door she rarely felt like going through. I’ve seen the pub where Branwell drank and bragged and drank some more; the corner where he met his friend John to sneak a final dram of gin. I could still go to Brussels, I suppose, and see where the pensionnat used to be, or return to Yorkshire to visit the houses of their friends. But I don’t know that it’s necessary. I know where Charlotte wandered, I know where she married, I know where she died. Perhaps that is enough to tell me what I need to know.
DURING my time at the Parsonage, I only asked to see one letter—from Charlotte’s time in Brussels. Charlotte concluded a letter to Ellen with “Good-bye to you dear Nell when I say so—it seems to me that you will hardly hear me—all the waves of the Channel, heaving and roaring between must deaden the sound.”11 On the back, she sketched a cartoon of the two of them. Charlotte is a disproportionate, gnome-like figure, waving under a speech balloon that says “G o o d b y e,” and looking across the sea to Ellen, who is graceful in an elegant dress, with a male companion in a top hat (labeled “The Chosen”). A steamship is puffing by in the background. I held onto the letter until my very last moment in the library, imagining Charlotte was waving goodbye to me, too, as I prepared to make my way home with my chosen, not just across the whole Atlantic Ocean, but all the intervening years too.
Before I left, I took one last tour of the museum. And this time, what had been impossible to access on my first harried walk-through sank into me like waves. It wasn’t a museum anymore; it was a home. I’d sat in Reverend Wade’s former dining room and breathed the house’s air, heard its creaks, crossed its kitchen flagstones every morning and afternoon. As I read, Charlotte was writing in the dining room, Patrick was smoking in his study, Emily was reading to Aunt Branwell, Anne was sewing, Branwell was painting upstairs, and Tabby was making tea. All of this was happening without regard to the passage of time, while I paged through tiny manuscripts and deciphered magnified pencil-marks. The chimes I heard from the clock on the stairs were the same tones the Brontës heard every hour—one morning the clock ran down, and the research librarian had to go get Patrick’s keys and wind it. They were still Patrick’s keys! School groups and clusters of visitors from all over the world had gathered on the other side of the kitchen wall behind me, and I heard them even through the closed door—they’d asked questions about a cooking implement or how the place was heated, what the Brontës ate or how long they’d lived. Another scholar or two shared the big table in the research library with me from time to time, checking postal records or examining illustrations up close. One thing I’ll say for the Parsonage—it is small and solitary, but it is full of life.
Figure 14.2: Cartoon of Charlotte waving. Letter to Ellen Nussey, March 6, 1843.
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE BRONTË PARSONAGE MUSEUM.
And I can take comfort in this: however she may have signed all those hurried letters after her marriage, Charlotte belongs to the readers who love her most. She will forever be Charlotte Brontë. It was not Mrs. Nicholls who insisted “I’m just going to write because I cannot help it,” or boldly traveled to Brussels, or wrote Jane Eyre.
When we left Haworth, I cried. Our cab to the train station eased to the bottom of the hill, turning onto the main road and steering us back to the present. As it did, a rainbow stretched in front of us, each end buried behind a rise of the moors. We drove toward it all the way to Keighley and never reached it. We never even came close.