The children's study

(That's how the servants referred to it.) This overgrown closet was their playroom, where they invented their famous imaginary kingdoms, inspired by a box of toy soldiers bought as a gift for Branwell. They play-acted stories, and wrote tiny, hand-sewn books and literary journals, complete with advertisements, about their characters.

Originally all four worked together on one group of stories, about a city called Glass Town, but Anne and Emily broke away to create their own country, Gondal, while Glass Town became Angria and belonged to Charlotte and Branwell. Some of the Angria writings survive, but there are only a few poems about Gondal (although some of Wuthering Heights may have started as Gondal stories.)

Even in their mid-twenties, Emily and Anne were still pretending to be their Gondal characters. In her diary paper after she and Anne took a brief trip to York, Emily doesn't mention anything they saw, only that “during our excursion we were Ronald Macelgin, Henry Angora, Juliet Augusteena, Rosobelle Esraldan, Ella and Julian Egramont Catherine Navarre and Cordelia Firzaphnold escaping from the Palaces of Instruction to join the Royalists who are hard driven at present by the victorious Republicans.”

The kitchen

Mr Brontë's successor, John Wade, made extensive changes to the parsonage, adding an extension and moving the kitchen (apparently he didn't understand that the building was a future shrine to the previous inhabitants) so this isn't the kitchen the Brontës used, although the furniture, dishes, and utensiles here did belong to the family.

The Reverend Brontë's study

Both Anne and Emily played the piano—Emily in particular was a skilled musician—but Charlotte had been discouraged from learning because of her extreme nearsightedness.

A few years after Anne's death, Patrick had the piano moved upstairs to one of the bedrooms, possibly so he no longer had to look at an instrument that no longer had anyone to play it.

The dining room

This is what I most wanted to see at the parsonage: the room, and the table, where those seven novels were written. (This is near the front entrance, and I would have come back to spend more time there, but I didn't realize that for crowd control reasons, the museum has one-way traffic. You look at the dining room, kitchen, and study on the first floor, then it's up the stairs to see the bedrooms and exhibits on the second floor. You go down by a different staircase and exit through the gift shop.)

The medallion above the sofa is a portrait of Branwell Brontë by his friend J. B. Leyland. Emily Brontë is believed to have died on that sofa, after refusing to see any doctors until a few hours before she died.

When Charlotte Brontë's friend and first biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, visited the parsonage in 1853, she could hear Charlotte walking in the dining room below her bedroom at night. One of the servants, Martha Brown, told her how the three sisters had spent evenings walking around the table, reading from and discussing their writing, late into the night. “Miss Emily walked as long as she could, and when she died Miss Anne and Miss Brontë took it up - and now my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone.”.

I've written that I often find Charlotte Brontë difficult to like, but it's impossible not to feel enormous sympathy for her.