Emerald Fennell’s film adaptation of “Wuthering Heights”, starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, has sparked “a new wave of Brontë pilgrims”, said Maria Crawford in the Financial Times.
I made my own trip to West Yorkshire to experience the “tumult of windswept moors” that inspired Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel, and the books of her sisters, for myself. Today, it feels something like an “open-air literary theme park”.
My first stop was the village of Thornton, near Bradford, to visit the Brontë Birthplace: “part museum, part magical guesthouse”. Charlotte, Anne, Emily and brother Branwell were all born here and the community-owned property was revamped and opened to the public last year.
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“Excitingly”, its three bedrooms can be booked by those eager to “sleep where their literary heroes once did”, said Cathy Toogood in The Telegraph. I stayed in “Charlotte’s room” where all four Brontë siblings slept. The “grandest” of all, it features a four-poster bed, “dusky pink chaise longue, an original fireplace and a small en-suite bathroom”.
If you’re after something even fancier, consider booking a room at Simonstone Hall – a “grand stone country-house hotel” around 50 miles north of Thornton where the cast of Fennell’s adaptation stayed during filming.
But it was the “handsome” village of Haworth, where Emily moved in 1820 as a toddler, and the “moody moors around it” that inspired much of “Wuthering Heights”. Today, her old family home – the Brontë Parsonage Museum – is filled with the world’s biggest collection of Brontë manuscripts, personal possessions and furnishings.
Here, you’ll find “everyday ephemera” from “Emily’s christening mug” to "Charlotte’s small writing desk”, said Victoria Moss in Vogue. The front parlour is set up as if the family had “just broken for tea”, but “tragedy, too, isn’t far from sight; against the wall is the sofa where Emily died from tuberculosis, aged 30”.
And “nestled next door” is St Michael and All Angels Church, where their father Patrick was the curate for four decades, and its “deeply atmospheric graveyard”. Emily is buried in the family vault beneath the church.
Afterwards, stop for lunch at the Black Bull Inn, where Branwell “the struggling Brontë brother fed his addictions”, said Crawford. Then head out into the “untamed wilderness” of the countryside; it’s a four-mile walk to Top Withens – the ruined farmhouse that’s said to have inspired “Wuthering Heights” – via the Brontë Waterfall, a tranquil spot beloved by the sisters.
