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.