Bronte Country

We hired a car for the day in Sheffield and drove to Haworth, the home of the Bronte sisters and the Parsonage Museum. I realised on the way there as we drove through Yorkshire, that it was my fictional world become reality. Everyone from the Brontes to DH Lawrence even to Barbara Taylor Bradford have written about these towns, and mills and mines, the black of the coal still staining the brick work of the houses, the long narrow hilly streets - close your eyes and picture the miners walking back home after their shifts.
And the museum!! I had always known that the three sisters read each other's writing each evening and walked around a table as they read. But when you see the room - it is tiny - maybe  it would take three steps to walk the length of the table - another three steps and back down the other side - past the sofa where apparently Emily died - lying on this short uncomfortable sofa. All the windows in the parsonage have blinds on them to protect the furniture but I so wanted to see out - to see what they saw when they looked out the window to the moors.
Had a drink with the drunken Branwell at the Black Bull - no matter how much they try to reconstitute him as someone we should feel sorry for I'm still with Charlotte
You ask about Branwell; he never thinks of seeking employment, and I begin to fear that he has rendered himself incapable of filling any respectable station in life; besides, if money were at his disposal, he would use it only to his own injury; the faculty of self-government is, I fear, almost destroyed in him. You ask me if I do not think that men are strange beings? I do, indeed. I have often thought so; and I think too that the mode of bringing them up is strange: they are not sufficiently guarded from temptation. Girls are protected as if they were something very frail or silly Indeed, while boys are turned loose on the world as if they, of all beings in existence, were the wisest and least liable to be led astray.