Best. Day. Ever. – The Brontë Parsonage Museum

So, you want to read about the Brontë Parsonage Museum? Well! Buckle in, this is going to be a long one!

Last Tuesday was, for me, the highlight of the trip so far… Quite literally, a place that I had waited to see for almost my entire life was right before me.

Let me explain.

In July of 1984, my mum, dad, sister and I went on a holiday to Far North Queensland. It was a fantastic trip and is still vivid in my memory for many reasons, but for one in particular. Every night we would cuddle up on the couch and we’d watch Channel Two. Back then, that’s what ABC1 was called, Channel Two. Actually, everyone else would cuddle up on the couch, while I lay on the floor, smelling like Pinetarsol. I had this horrible tropical heat rash that was just so itchy that I couldn’t sit with anyone. I can even recall the smell of Pinetarsol now.

Anyway, back to why we were watching Channel Two. They were playing a couple of mini-series that I loved. The first was an Australian drama about the Heidelberg School of painters. I thought it was called ‘One Golden Summer’ – I’ve since found it referred to as ‘One Summer Again‘.

The second was a BBC costume drama (before “costume drama” was a real term). We found this show accidentally, by flicking through the channels one night. The first thing we saw was this scene: a little girl was standing on a stool, being reprimanded by a snivelly, wicked old man. A room full of girls, all in the same clothes were sat staring at this girl, as the man was telling them all that she was a liar.

Mum did a slight scream of excitement, and said “Oh! This is ‘Jane Eyre’!” I turned and looked at her and said, “What’s that?”  I was genuinely interested. I have always been a bit of an “other time” type person. I loved dressing up in colonial dresses when I was a little girl. While other Mum’s made their daughters clothes for their Barbies, that resembled the adults of the early 1980s, I asked my mum to make dresses that looked more like they were from the 1880s “and while you are doing that, do you think you could make outfits that look like Henry VIII’s wives?”… Yeah, I was a bit weird like that. So, when I saw a show with a heap of little girls from the 1800s, I was super keen.

“It’s a book,” my mum said. “I got your sister’s middle name from the main character, and I re-read the book when I was pregnant with you in the hospital.”

“Oh…”

And with that, a life long love affair began.

I have now read the book (this link will take you to my favourite edition) too many times to count. I try to read it at least once every year – even in 2014, when I decided I wouldn’t read anything that I had read before, I listened to the audio book and watched the mini-series constantly. (If you would like a plain edition of the book you might want to click here).

I also have a Jane Eyre tattoo on my back (I had this done at Lampin Ink in Adelaide, South Australia). It is a lady’s cameo, that I designed, and underneath reads:

“Come to me – come to me entirely now,’ said he: and added, in his deepest tone, speaking in my ear as his cheek was laid on mine, ‘Make my happiness – I will make yours.”

Fast forward thirty or so years and I was standing on the steps of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. This is the house where Charlotte Bronte lived (the author of ‘Jane Eyre’).

There is so much to say! I wrote an email to my sister gushing about the awesomeness of this place (she is an avid Jane Eyre fan too). So rather than write something completely new, I’ll just put a slightly edited copy of that here.

So, you wanted to know how my day went at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled I was to be there.

There is a small building where you enter and buy your tickets (this is also where the gift shop is – we went in there at the end). After you buy your tickets you walk outside and around to the parsonage (the Brontë family house). It is a Georgian style building (you can see more “summer-y” photos of the outside of the house on the museum website).

You enter the building through the front door, which is opened for you on your approach by a museum worker – who hands you a children’s guide (if you have children with you) and explains which rooms to visit and in which order. He also gave us a few extra bits of information about the rooms.

You proceed into the hallway to find four rooms down stairs. There is Patrick’s sitting room (the father), the daughter’s (Charlotte, Anne and Emily) sitting/dining room, the kitchen and another small study which used to be their storage room (for drying out the peat and keeping their goose indoors in winter). The storage room was converted into Mr Nicholls’ study. He was Charlotte’s husband. She converted the study upon her marriage (and receiving her payments for Jane Eyre). The rooms were all roped off, for viewing only, so you couldn’t actually walk into the room and touch anything, but that was good enough for me.The father’s and daughter’s study were all with original furniture, and such original objects as books, writing cases, chairs and benches, fireplaces, even the eye glasses sitting on the table were actually theirs. There was a love seat in the girl’s study that apparently Emily Brontë died on. Quite creepy really. Even the decor (wall paper and curtains) were recreated from exact descriptions in the girl’s note books and letters.

The kitchen was a re-creation, as the Parson who was at the church after the death of Patrick Brontë, extended out the back room to make that the kitchen. He turned the original Brontë kitchen into an extra sitting/dining room. The Brontë Parsonage Museum has turned the room back into the kitchen, so everything is “of the time” rather than original. But it is still gorgeous. It is my type of kitchen; wood stove, wooden table, copper pots and pans. Not an electric appliance (or a clock – you know how I hate clocks) in sight!

Upstairs was the bedrooms. The father’s bedroom (which he shared with his sickly son, Bramwell), the servant’s quarters, Bramwell’s art studio, Emily and Anne’s room, and what would have been the Brontë children’s playroom.

Then there was Charlotte’s (and Nicholas’) bedroom. The other bedrooms were all decorated as bedrooms, but Charlotte’s bedroom was filled with glass cases that had items from her life. Dresses and shoes and gloves and hats, eye glasses, books, notes, lace handkerchiefs… It was so… I don’t know… a bit odd to look at. Like suddenly, I could actually imagine this woman as being a real person. I think somehow I had imagined Charlotte Brontë as being unreal, but now she was very real. It was so interesting.

She must have been so little. The dress would have been short on me (in all my five foot, two-inch glory) and her feet were OH so small… MAYBE ArgeyDaughter’s feet would have JUST fit into her shoes. Apparently, her feet were the only thing she liked about herself because they were petite and dainty. Seems that women back then had issues about their bodies just like today.

As you left the bedrooms and went into Bramwell’s art studio, you could walk through the exhibition room, on the other side of the house. This room was a modern addition, and it sits above the ticketing area and the gift shop. It had a photographic timeline of the Brontë family. Big photo boards hung around the room with the story of the life of the family, starting from when Mr and Mrs Brontë met each other, through to the death of the father (Patrick) who outlived all of his children.

This area was also great for the kids; they had a play area with replica toys that the Brontë children would have played with (a dolls house and ten pin bowling style toy soldiers) and they also had a mirror and box of dress up clothes in the style of a Parson’s children.

The other thing that was fascinating about this room, is it shows how much of Jane Eyre was inspired from things around Charlotte. There was a cabinet in the room that was painted with the ghoulish faces of the twelve disciples (exactly as described in Jane Eyre, chapter twenty). Apparently, the cupboard belonged to the family of a friend of Charlotte’s, who was called Eyre.

“I must see the light of the unsnuffed candle wane on my employment; the shadows darken on the wrought, antique tapestry round me, and grow black under the hangings of the vast old bed, and quiver strangely over the doors of a great cabinet opposite–whose front, divided into twelve panels, bore, in grim design, the heads of the twelve apostles, each enclosed in its separate panel as in a frame; while above them at the top rose an ebon crucifix and a dying Christ.

According as the shifting obscurity and flickering gleam hovered here or glanced there, it was now the bearded physician, Luke, that bent his brow; now St. John’s long hair that waved; and anon the devilish face of Judas, that grew out of the panel, and seemed gathering life and threatening a revelation of the arch traitor–of Satan himself–in his subordinate’s form.”

There were also family friends called Eshton, Fairfax, Bessie… Even Thornfield was a name created as a mix of two places she had visited… It was quite incredible. Oh, and the brother set his bed on fire with a candle, no doubt inspiring Rochester’s bed catching a light. She seemed to borrow quite a bit from her everyday life and dramatically embellish it to create the story.

After this, we went downstairs and exited the museum itself, where there was a small display of arts and crafts of the era (how people did embroidery with hair, or book binding etc). Then we went into the shop. I could have bought the whole shop honestly. But I settled for a few bits and pieces (bookmarks, earrings, a brooch for me, and a deluxe edition of Wuthering Heights). I really wanted to buy Wuthering Heights as I had never read it AND you know, when you buy a book at the museum you can get it stamped to say it was bought at the Bronte Museum. Done deal!

I have finished Wuthering Heights now. It is a horrible book – the characters are entirely morbid, cruel and unappealing, but passionate. The writing is amazing of course, and something about the characters all being horrible makes the story entirely unique and enthralling. I can’t wait to read it again! I’d suggest, maybe listen to it on audio book before you have a go at reading it, as it is quite a struggle to read with everyone being so horrible, and some characters are written with a Yorkshire accent which makes it a little hard to decipher at times. I think I threw the book on the chair and stormed off at least once every chapter, determined that everyone was just too nasty to keep reading – but then I’d want to know what happened so I’d go back.

I wanted to buy a lovely edition of Jane Eyre, but nothing appealed to me as much as mum’s old copy with my baby scribbles inside the front cover. One day I will go back and buy a copy of one of the Brontë biographies.

Then again, one day, when I have saved lots of pennies, I will buy a first edition ‘Jane Eyre’. Yep. I think that is my life’s ambition.

If you have never read a Brontë book before, or perhaps you are not a reader, I would encourage you to get to know the stories and then visit the museum! Perhaps you are a better suited to binge watching something on Netflix? Or getting a download from Amazon?

I would suggest the following:

Wuthering Heights (starring Tom Hardy, Charlotte Riley, and Andrew Lincoln)

Jane Eyre (starring Ruth Wilson and Toby Stephens)

To Walk Invisible (a new documentary series about the Brontë family)

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NB – I’m truly sorry for the lack of photographs in this post. We were not allowed to take photo’s in the museum (as is the case in many old buildings and churches in the UK). Please take the time to go through the museum website’s page on the parsonage itself, as they have photos and a description of each room, although some of the rooms looked a bit different when we were there.

First published on February 17, 2016.

Updated August 10, 2018.

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