In 1820 Patrick Bronte became perpetual curate of Haworth, West Yorkshire, bringing his wife and six young children to its 18th-century parsonage. Virtually the last house in the village, it faced the Reverend Bronte's church and its graveyard, with empty tracts of Pennine moorland to the rear. "Everything about the place tells of the most dainty order", Mrs Gaskell wrote in her life of Charlotte Bronte, but Haworth itself was anything but dainty, with its wool mills, high infant mortality rate and disaffected labour force. Fearing Chartist agitators, the Reverend Bronte kept a loaded pistol under his pillow at night, discharging it out the window every morning. With the death of Mrs Bronte in 1821, the children were very busy with household chores from an early age. At night they were entertained round the kitchen fire with their nurse Tabby Aykroyd's tales of the Yorkshire Moors. Writing was done in the children's study upstairs, where Charlotte and Branwell worked on the chronicles of Angria, and Emily and Anne on their rival imaginary kingdom, Gondal. Their closely collaborative working habits continued into adulthood. In 1846 a visitor to the parsonage might have found Emily writing Wuthering Heights, Charlotte writing The Professor and Anne writing Agnes Grey all at once in the downstairs parlour. As they worked, the sisters liked to walk around the table trading ideas. Their servant Martha Brown would later remember lying in bed and hearing Charlotte walking in circles below, unable to give up the ritual even when she was the only one left. Winding the clock and retiring to bed, the widowed Reverend Bronte did not sleep quite alone: from 1845 he shared a bedroom with Branwell, the beloved only son who had turned out a violent drunkard and opium addict. He is a haunting presence in his sisters' work, providing Anne with the model for the dissolute Huntingdon in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. He wasn't the only sibling to haunt the novelist sisters: among the artefacts in the museum are the specimens of embroidery that are all that survive of Maria and Elizabeth, the sisters who died of consumption picked up at Cowan Bridge school (the Lowood of Jane Eyre).
Like Jane Austen, the Brontes were skilful at concealing their writing; the first her father heard of Charlotte's novels was when she presented him with a copy of Jane Eyre in 1850. Most secretive of all was Emily: on being bitten by a wild dog, she cauterised the wound with a red-hot iron in the kitchen rather than ask help of the rest of the household, "for fear of the terrors that might beset their weaker minds", as Mrs Gaskell describes it. We can gaze at the sofa where she sickened and died of consumption, the piano she used to play, and the manuscript pages in her tiny script, but she remains tantalizingly unknowable.
Branwell, Emily and Anne all died within a few months of each other in 1848-1849. Charlotte stayed on with her father and married in 1855, but died of complications during pregnancy a few months later. Her father lingered until 1861. All but Anne, who died in Scarborough, were buried in the church's family vault. The old church was demolished in 1879, and the parsonage substantially altered before becoming a museum in 1928. Visitors who don't remember it from Peter Kosminsky's 1992 screen adaptation of Wuthering Heights are in for one last surprise as they leave the museum - a weatherbeaten tombstone propped against the wall and inscribed "Heathcliff".
Haworth Parsonage and adjoining museum are open most of the year, Tel: 0044- 1535-642323.