ABSTRACT
The Brontë Parsonage is probably the best-known literary shrine in Britain, apart from houses associated with Shakespeare and perhaps Jane Austen’s house at Chawton. Each year some 100,000 national and international visitors pay homage at the home of the Brontës. What is enshrined here is the myth of three famous writing sisters—symbols of adversity and endurance, isolated in a stone house standing on the edge of the windswept Yorkshire moors. The story of their struggle as Victorian women to become writers, to earn their own living and to express their unconventional views, led to their identification with the heroines of their novels. They were conflated with the unhappy orphan Jane Eyre and the wild Catherine Earnshaw roaming the moors; this is still essentially the image of the writers that tourists bring with them when they visit Haworth parsonage for the first time. Like all myths, that of the Brontës involves a simplified view and is easy to manipulate; the house is always isolated, always on the edge of the windswept moor, always surrounded by death and always seen from the outside.
