Abstract This essay explores the largely under-read Brontë Parsonage garden. The garden was used as a signifier of the supposed Brontë ‘gloom’ by Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Gaskell, two inaugurators of the Brontë myth. By paying attention to how the garden was described in their travelogues, I examine the ways in which later pilgrims to the Brontë shrine in Haworth helped consolidate its reputation for bleakness. The Brontë garden featured in their recollections as a liminal space between English domesticity and Yorkshire wilderness, between femininity and creativity, and between life and death. One myth I want to disentangle is the popular image of Charlotte as the angel who laboured dutifully in the Parsonage garden. It may have been Emily Brontë who cared about gardening. I then argue that the Parsonage garden and the Yorkshire moors are places where later occupants and pilgrims can negotiate their affiliations with the literary family, the region, and a version of the nation the Brontës came to embody. Whereas the Haworth moorland embodies a regionalist perception of Northern Englishness as wild and barren, in the afterlife of the Brontës, the garden usually attests to a notion of Englishness as cultivated, delicate, and disciplined. The various transformations the Parsonage garden underwent in the half-century since the 1860s, the various responses to such changes, as well as recent creative refashioning of the image of the ‘Brontës in the garden’, all speak to the transformation of the Brontë myth and the ever-changing affiliations of locals, visitors, and the public with Brontë heritage.
Tianming Bai (Thu,) studied this question.