The Bronte parsonage garden in september.

And these bright flowers I love so well,

Verbena, rose and sweet bluebell,
Must droop and die away;
Those thick green leaves, with all their shade
And rustling music, they must fade
And every one decay.
         Anne Brontë

What a wonderful summer we have had: there is lots of new growth in the garden, all our new planting is thriving and the roses have been exceptional.

Here we are at the end of September torn in two directions: (A) should we be cutting back and putting the garden to bed for the winter? Or, (B), should we just keep on enjoying the late summer flowers, of which there are plenty?

Well, as usual, we have come to a compromise: the shady bed next to the graveyard is looking tired and in need of work so perhaps some new and more inspired planting there.  As next year we shall be commemorating Patrick Brontë and Haworth and also the bicentenary of his curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls, who served Patrick and Haworth for sixteen years, the new planting will honour these two men whom we hold in such high esteem.  This last few years we have had so many bicentenaries to celebrate and, in our way, Geoff and I have redesigned three of the smaller flower beds in memory of Charlotte, Branwell and Emily so, continuing this theme, we will have Patrick Brontë and Mr Nicholls in mind as we give this shady bed a new look.

Already we have cut back and cleared the most invasive plants and we will refresh the soil in readiness for the new plants we shall be introducing over the next couple of weeks.  Having done that, the other more colourful beds will be cut back as and when the time is right.  This autumn we are also planning to build up our bulb stock with view to having a colourful and showy garden in the spring.

I shall be having an operation on my hand in October which means I shall be unable to garden over the next few months.  Thankfully, these will be the winter months when we, in any case, tiptoe away and leave the garden to its rest.

Please don’t forget to look after the birds this winter; they bring us so much joy it is heart-breaking to think of them suffering in the harsh winter weather. Have a happy and healthy winter, and don’t forget to call in on the garden at any time. bronteseptember-in-the-parsonage-garden

On the last Friday of the month, our curatorial team host exclusive Brontë Treasures sessions, sharing some of our most special items up close in the research library with pre-booked guests. These sessions are the perfect gift for the Brontë fan in your life (or treat for yourself!) and we've just uploaded the slots for the first half of 2019. Head to our website to find out more. facebook/BronteParsonageMuseum

Beautiful Haworth

Such a beautiful picture on facebook

Thank you Catherine York

Brontë was no romantic child of nature but a pragmatic, self-interested Tory. Why is she still adored for her ‘screeching melodrama’ of a novel?

i-love-weblog-abigails-ateliers

Great article. Read all: theguardian/emily-bronte-strange-cult-wuthering-heights-romantic-novel
Far from writing “from the impulse of nature” and “the dictates of intuition” as Charlotte would have it, Emily Brontë was a richly resourced and highly self-conscious literary artist. In particular she was steeped in second-wave Romanticism, which she knew from her father’s fine collection of work by Shelley, Scott and Byron. Another, complementary, set of references came from the mystery and horror of German Romantic literature, which she read in the original. For while the little Wheelwrights were crying their eyes out, Emily was busy poring over her German grammar and reading spooky gothic tales by the likes of ETA Hoffmann. If Wuthering Heights struck contemporary critics as unrecognisably strange, it was only because then, as now, people had very short literary memories. In an age when Gaskell was gearing up to write her Condition of England novels, with their close attention to economic and social injustice in the industrial north, Brontë’s attachment to older gothic models (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an obvious one to set alongside Hoffmann) came over as strikingly odd. It wasn’t that Wuthering Heights was shockingly avant garde so much as wilfully retro, just like the deeply unfashionable clothes that Emily insisted on wearing in Belgium, despite the derisive sniggers of her more sophisticated classmates.

Despite there being two servants to look after the modestly sized parsonage and one modestly sized parson, Emily made a case for needing to be onsite as an extra housekeeper. And to offset her lack of income, she became an expert financial investor, studying newspapers to ensure that the family’s modest savings were placed in the best-performing railway stocks. She was cannily alert, too, to the way that the literary market worked. When the Brontës’ first book, a joint collection of poetry, sold only a handful of copies, she was quick to turn to the much more profitable genre of fiction, in the same way that Plath self-consciously set out to write a “potboiler” of a novel – The Bell Jar – as a break from the slow and thankless business of trying to sell her verse.

In the place of Emily Brontë the wuthery maiden of the moors, we need to put Emily Brontë the ruthlessly self-defined artist. I happen to hate that art – no many how many popularity polls it wins, and no matter how many literary critics point out how cleverly it is crafted, nothing will convince me that Wuthering Heights is anything but a hot mess. But the fact that it exists at all, written in such unpromising circumstances by a woman who was convinced of her right to produce it, has a certain magnificence. Emily Brontë is the patron saint of difficult women. For that alone, she is to be admired, if only grudgingly and from a safe distance.