Tour de France is expected to attract more than a million people in Yorkshire

Even Bronte country has developed a taste for baguettes as Yorkshire gears up for the start of the 101st Tour de France in its backyard this weekend.
In Haworth, the village made famous by the Bronte sisters, the world-famous museum in their honour will close on Sunday because of the huge crowds expected along Main Street to see Chris Froome and Mark Cavendish climb up the cobbles.
‘The sisters would have found it exciting — not a lot happened in Haworth in their day,’ says museum director Ann Insdale.  Charlotte in particular loved anything to do with France. She studied in Brussels and spoke fluent French. She’d have enjoyed having such an iconic event here.’ It seems Yorkshire’s current generation feel the same. Everywhere you look, the white rose county is turning yellow to mark the greatest endurance test in sport. Police anticipate at least a million people will turn up to watch Saturday’s opening 118-mile stage between Leeds and Harrogate — known as Le Grand Depart — and Sunday’s York-Sheffield leg, which measures 124 miles. A statue of Edward the Black Prince in Leeds’ City Square has had a yellow jersey planted on it. Read more: dailymail

Ponden Hall

Helen Akhurst

 

Ponden Hall  beautiful photographes.

 

 

Helen MacEwan’s new Brontë book

Helen MacEwan’s new book is, indeed, a journey back in time to the Brussels the Brontë sisters would have known in the early 1840s. No one can dip into these sumptuous pages without escaping contemporary Brussels . Along with a wealth of colour illustrations from the period. The Brontës in Brussels presents a fascinating look at how this city influenced the two sisters’ hearts and imaginations. Cogent details transport the time-traveller immediately: we follow Charlotte on a ramble along the Rue de Louvain, where she refreshed herself with a coffee and currant bun; we slip into an illustration of a wide, leafy boulevard with views over the surrounding countryside, and find ourselves at once elated and heartsick to touch this Brussels we will never know. Thanks to Helen’s book, however, this vanished city still has a pulse. She guides us to those corners where, if we close our eyes, we might still detect a horse’s hoof or rustle of silk in the endless drone of traffic. Such moments bring a familiar frisson to those of us who have spent many years in Brussels and fallen in love with her enigmas.
Most moving of all is Helen’s inclusion of Charlotte’s letters to Constantin Heger. The stark intimacy of these confessions draws the reader far from Brussels, all the way to the moorland chill of Yorkshire and the grey-clad little woman who anguished there, in physical and emotional exile from her “promised land”. It is with a strange sort of clairvoyance that we read those letters, knowing as we do how Charlotte’s genius would eventually transform her despair into great art. brusselsbronte

CHARLOTTE BRONTË made only £500 from her novel, Jane Eyre.

But now a rare a first edition copy of the book is set to fetch between £15,000 and £20,000 at an auction. Auctioneer Sotheby’s says the book, first published in three volumes in 1847 under Bronte’s pseudonym ‘Currer Bell’, is “an unusually clean first edition copy”. The auction takes place on July 15. Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, said: “Charlotte was offered £100 for the copyright. With further editions and foreign rights her actual payments were in the region of £500. “There is a well-known account by the head of the firm, George Smith,describing how he started reading the manuscript of Jane Eyre and was so gripped by it that he cancelled all engagements for the day so that he could finish reading it. “ Last year a poem by Charlotte Brontë, I’ve been Wandering in the Greenwoods, sold for £92,450 more than double the £45,000 it had been expected to fetch . It meant that each word of the 16-line poem was worth more than £1,000. yorkshirepost