Moving along the Brontë Trail, Wayfarers walkers passed through the spectacular English countryside.The Full Brontë
The British countryside is home to the real sites behind Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and other works by the literary sisters
- By William Ecenbarger
- Smithsonian.com, September 03, 2009
The storm had been assembling itself all morning, and finally the glowering sky, veined with lightning, loosed a rain of Old Testament proportions. Alan Pinkney looked up approvingly, then turned to the seven walkers he was leading and exclaimed, “This is perfect—I can almost see Heathcliff riding across the moor!”
We had ignored the clouds to hike some three miles to a remote, ruined farmhouse named Top Withins. It was little more than crumbling walls, but in its original form it is widely believed to have been the model for Wuthering Heights, home of the wild and mysterious Mr. Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s classic 1847 novel of passion, rage and revenge.
This was the first of five days that we followed in the footsteps of Britain’s most famous literary family, the Brontë sisters–Emily, Charlotte and Anne–the authors of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and other, lesser-known masterpieces. Like the sisters a century and a half earlier, we took long walks across the bleak Yorkshire moors and through the stupendous sweep of scenery in Derbyshire’s Peak District, all the while touching the landscapes and buildings that animated their work.
“A Brontë tour is unparalleled in its richness because you have the unique situation of three literary geniuses spending most of their creative lives in the same place,” says Pinkney, who spent three weeks putting together the walk along the “Brontë Trail” for the Wayfarers, a 25-year-old British company specializing in small-group walking tours. “And the only way to do it right is on foot.”
Indeed, it can be argued that much of 18th and 19th century English literature was born afoot.
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/The-Full-Bronte.html?c=y&page=1#ixzz0Q9CaumFY
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