Literary Links

The Bronte novels Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre have made an international shrine of Haworth and its surrounding moors.

Bronte Parsonage Museum is restored much as the family would have known it. Major exhibitions regularly cast new light on the lives and works of the family.

The Brontes travelled widely beyond Haworth and the Bronte Way footpath links many places familiar to the family.

Sites with Bronte connections include:

• Thornton near Bradford, the Brontes’ birthplace;
• Wycoller Country Park near Colne whose ruined hall was ‘Ferndean Manor’ in Jane Eyre;
• Gawthorpe Hall in Padiham, Burnley where Charlotte was a regular visitor;
• Shibden Hall Halifax, possibly inspiration for settings in Wuthering Heights. Along the valley at Luddenden is Branwell Bronte’s drinking haunt, the Lord Nelson.

In Kirklees, Oakwell Hall Birstall and Red House Gomersal gave settings to Charlotte Bronte’s novel Shirley with its theme of local Luddite Revolt. At Red House, The Secret’s Out gallery brings to life Charlotte’s local friendships.

In our own times, the late Ted Hughes has been among those whose local roots toughened their genius.

Ted Hughes was born at Mytholmroyd near Hebden Bridge and wrote vividly of the Calder Valley and the Haworth Moors. Hughes’ wife, poet and feminist icon, Sylvia Plath is buried in Heptonstall Churchyard.

A man “who changed the face of modern English literature”, Hughes’ home at Lumb Bank, Heptonstall and a new Theatre has been dedicated to his memory at Calder High School, Mytholmroyd. The first Ted Hughes literary festival was held in summer 2007.

The region has also proved a powerful subject for local diarists and historians, among them the unorthodox Anne Lister, mistress of Shibden Hall, Halifax and Sam Bamford of Milnrow, the writer of Passages From the Life of A Radical.