Haworth and the Bronte Parsonage

Up and out again at 8:30 this morning, our class traveled via mini-coach to Haworth, location of the Bronte Parsonage. Our reading of the novel Wuthering Heights had made me greatly anticipate this trip, so I could learn more about the Bronte family and about the setting in which Emily lived at the time she wrote the novel. We walked through the main town shops of Haworth, past the church that the Brontes attended, and finally reached the Bronte homestead.
The entire atmosphere of Haworth combined with the history of the Brontes, I felt, gave me a better understanding of Emily, Charlotte, and Ann—and they didn’t just skim over the other Brontes as well. I liked that they gave a complete history of their lives, making sure to give the most honest portrayal of the family to dispel the curious buzz that surrounded them for a while after their deaths. My own idea of the sisters as lonely, uneducated but somehow brilliant women was altered after hearing about their childhood education and encouragement by their father, Patrick Bronte. His pushing inspired their perseverance and skill; Patrick Bronte himself stated that if he had been a calm, serene man, his life would have been different and his children would not have been as successful as they were. The graveyard that holds an estimated 66,000 bodies to this day sits directly in front of the house, and the Brontes had to constantly pass this whenever they went out of the house. Personally, I didn’t think much of the graveyard, and I don’t think it would have bothered me. But it made me wonder how the sisters would have been affected when writing their stories—was Emily a true believer in spirits herself, or was the ghostly paranoia in Wuthering Heights only inserted to add ambiguity to the novel?
The moors, though, were the highlight of my trip—the views were extraordinary. I could see miles of endless heath stretching on all sides, dotted every now and then with crammed but still somehow quaint villages. I felt that I could really imagine Catherine and Heathcliff climb out of Wuthering Heights and into the tall grasses tinged with purple flowers where they spent all their lives. I could see too how the moors could become dangerous if a snowstorm or heavy rain happened to fall and how an unfamiliar traveler could get off course and travel for miles in the wrong direction. Using my imagination in this way made me feel particularly more in the mindset of the sisters as they sat down to their quill pens and portable wooden desks to write their famously incredible stories. Logically, though, I tried to find any direct connection between the people Emily knew and the characters in Wuthering Heights. It seems Branwell Bronte’s alcoholism later in life was mirrored in Hindley Earnshaw, and the deaths of parents and young people in the novel Emily would have experience firsthand, but then conceivably she could have been using generalities in both cases, and not basing anything on personal experience. I’d like to imagine the former.