Our brand-new 2025 exhibition puts the Brontës’ Haworth home front and centre.
The Brontës’ enduring popularity is largely explained by the power and originality of the stories they created, but the story of the Brontës’ own lives is as compelling as their fictions. The family’s home at Haworth Parsonage, and the moorland surrounding it, were a profound influence on the Brontës, and became part of the irresistible draw of Haworth for visitors from all over the world.
Hot on the heels of the sensational Brontë novels came Elizabeth Gaskell’s best-selling biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, published just two years after the death of its subject. The book was partly written to satisfy an already burgeoning public interest in the Brontës, and it was perhaps inevitable that Haworth would become a destination for literary pilgrimage.
This exhibition looks at the popular conception of Haworth, nurtured by the many film and TV adaptations of the Brontës’ lives and works. It traces a development from the first literary pilgrims to mass tourism in Haworth, featuring letters, manuscripts, souvenir albums and material drawn from the Museum’s drama archive.
