American author Tracy Chevalier is helping to mastermind the bicentenary celebrations of Charlotte Brontë in Yorkshire.

American author Tracy Chevalier is helping to mastermind the bicentenary celebrations of Charlotte Brontë in Yorkshire. She talks to Yvette Huddleston.

Novelist Tracy Chevalier was approached 18 months ago by the Brontë Parsonage Museum with a special request. “I think I said ‘yes’ by return email – I didn’t even have to think about it, I knew I wanted to do it,” she says. This year marks 200 years since Charlotte Brontë’s birth and it is the start of an exciting phase for Brontë fans, with a whole series of events planned around the siblings’ bicentenaries – Branwell in 2017, Emily in 2018, Anne in 2020 – and Chevalier has been invited, to her obvious delight, to be what the museum is calling its “creative partner” throughout 2016.

“The Parsonage wanted to bring in someone from outside to help them come up with new and different ways to celebrate Charlotte’s bicentenary,” says Chevalier. “I had spoken here before on a couple of occasions and they asked me if I would be interested in taking part in this. The remit was to come up with an exhibition, a publication and a series of events.”

Chevalier was keen to get involved in the project having been writer in residence at York Art Gallery in 2008 and curator of a quilt exhibition (she is a keen quilter herself, more of which later) in 2014.

She says she immediately came up with lots of suggestions, admitting that she had to be reined in a little. “I had about a million ideas,” she laughs. “And some of them have happened.”

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