Bronte Parsonage Museum

 

The Telegraph and Argus features the current exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Heaven is a Home, as well as Ann Dinsdale's book At Home with the Brontës:

In the words of Charlotte Bronte’s biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, it is a “low, oblong stone parsonage, high up, yet with a higher backdrop of sweeping moors”. Today Haworth Parsonage is a world-famous literary shrine. Thousands of tourists visit the house, now the Bronte Parsonage Museum, to discover what inspired Emily, Charlotte and Anne.
Yet it is often forgotten that the parsonage has also been home to several other families, before and after the Brontes. Following Patrick Bronte’s death in 1861, it was occupied by four of his successors at Haworth’s parish church then, when the Bronte Society bought the building in 1928, it became home to four custodians and their families, who witnessed the growth of tourism in Haworth.
A new collection of photographs and artefacts, on display at the Bronte Parsonage Museum until the end of this year, reveals the secret life of the building through the stories of those who lived there. Called Heaven Is A Home, it also uses letters, sketches and documents to detail domestic details of the Brontes’ residence.
The exhibition complements the Parsonage’s recent £60,000 refurbishment. Decorative historian Allyson McDermott used forensic analysis on tiny samples of paint and paper left from the Brontes’ time to recreate a decorative scheme close to that of their residence.
Also linked to the exhibition is At Home With The Brontes by Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the museum, tracing the history of the house and those who lived there, from a horsewhip-wielding minister to a sitcom actor’s daughter. (Emma Clayton) (Read more)