Branwell's room

This installation, showing how Branwell's room might have looked in the 1830's when he was pursuing his art and writing, was produced by the production designer for the Sally Wainwright Brontë film To Walk Invisible.

One of the frequent criticisms of that film was that there was too much Branwell in it. Which I think is a fair comment—at times, it does feel as if you have to peek behind all the Branwell drama in the foreground to catch a glimpse of what his sisters were doing. But that's what it's like with an addict in the family; I know from sad experience how they act as a kind of black hole sucking all the life and energy around them into the vortex of their own endless neediness.

The story that Branwell set off for London to enroll in the Royal Academy of Art, spent all of his money getting drunk and then returned home claiming that he had been robbed, may not be true, but it is not implausible. He was a talented artist and writer (Charlotte cribbed part of her first novel The Professor from one of the Angrian stories Branwell wrote) but not as talented as he believed himself to be. He tried to make a living as a portrait painter in Bradford, but there were too many better painters in the area for him to succeed. He worked for a time at an isolated railway station but was fired, and then lost the job Anne got for him as tutor in the family where she had been a governess for several years after he had an affair with his employer's wife (costing Anne her job as well—she felt she had no choice but to resign.)

But even before the horrors of the last few years of his life, the frequent raging arguments begging money from Patrick so he could buy gin, passing out and setting his bedclothes on fire so that Patrick was forced to sleep with him every night, there was the anger and resentment his sisters must have felt at seeing the opportunities and privilege he had enjoyed as the only son squandered. And knowing they could never rely on him if their father died and they lost their home.

After the book of poems they published anonymously only sold two copies, they turned to writing novels. It was as much a practical decision as an artistic one, if not exactly a guarantee of success. Their only other option was being teachers or governesses, and both Charlotte and Emily had already failed to make a success at that. But it turned out that writing novels was something they were very, very good at.

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 utensils 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.

The Parsonage

I'd seen many pictures of it, so I wasn't surprised by how very ordinary a building it is. The stone buildings on the main street of Haworth look more like what you'd expect the birthplace of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre to resemble, instead of this staid, square 18th century Georgian.

The non-Potter Shambles

There are actually only a few Harry Potter-oriented businesses on the street, and it is authentically medieval, with some of the buildings dating from the 14th century. It was once known as the Great Flesh Shambles (shambles meaning stall or bench) because it was where all the butchers had their businesses. The jettied floors overhanging the street kept it cool and shady, better for keeping the meat fresh.

The Society of Alchemists

I avoided The Shop That Must Not Be Named and The Potions Cauldron, but did go into this shop, thinking I might find a suitably New Age-y gift for a friend of mine. It seemed more Halloween than New Age, with skull candles and jars of sweets with ghoulish names, but I did like the giant dragon guarding the door.

Brontë Parsonage

I spent the morning in the parsonage museum. Though I had seen some of the exhibits in New York several years ago, it was definitely very different seeing them in the rooms where the family actually lived. I'm too tired to post much tonight—it was hot today, and I tried, mostly successfully, to walk a little on the footpath behind the parsonage and through the field full of sheep beyond.

This was something I hadn't seen before and I found it very moving: Charlotte Brontë's wedding bonnet and veil.

She was such a complicated person; brilliant, yes, but petty and self-righteous and occasionally dishonest. She was an artist, who turned her tragic family history into literature, but also used it as kind of a performance when her growing fame brought her into contact with women she admired and wanted to impress. (Maybe it eased her crippling shyness and consciousness of how physically unattractive she was. People described her as a strange small woman with missing teeth and tiny hands. Most of them didn't really like her.)

Her friends and her father were disapproving of her decision to marry her father's curate when she was 38 years old, but it actually gives me more sympathy for her, when so many of her actions inspired an active dislike. To have lost all of her siblings, to find herself alone in the parsonage except for her father, and to have this chance. Why wouldn't she take it?

And she was apparently quite happy, but died less than a year later from pregnancy complications in the room where I saw this bonnet this morning.

Haworth

What a charming place.

I meant to come here last summer, after the Brontë course at Merton, when I still remembered all the ins and outs of the novels and the family history, but I got sick and went home early.

So I decided to try again this year, and do it before the program starts next week. It was easy to plan—I booked the same hotels I'd reserved last year, adding a couple of extra nights so I could go slow on my bad knee. And since I'm coming back to Oxford afterwards, unlike last year when I planned to go to London from Yorkshire and then home, I don't have to carry a month's worth of luggage with me. I left my big suitcase in a luggage storage place in Oxford, and crammed a couple changes of clothes and some clean underwear into my backpack.

I had to take three trains and a taxi to get here from Oxford, and delays caused by a strike meant that I had to hobble as fast as I could to platforms on the other side of every train station and I still missed both of my connections, but at least I wasn't dragging a suitcase.

The train I finally caught for the last leg, from Leeds to Keighley, was extremely local. We stopped every five minutes at places with names like Bingley and Woodlesford and Wakefield Kirkgate. (After having gone through Derbyshire on the first leg and blowing a mental kiss to Lizzie Bennet, I was amused to see another Pride and Prejudice name pop up. Why, hello Mr Bingley!)

But I made it, and after basically being held hostage in my apartment for the past couple of months with a knee that refused to navigate my four flights of stairs, it's reassuring to find that I'm still able to do this. Go places. See things.

I'm staying at an inn at the top of Haworth's steep, cobbled main street, and I can actually see the moors at the bottom of the hill from my window. The other picture is a footpath behind the Brontë Parsonage. The cobblestones and uneven ground are challenging, and I'm not going to be doing any hikes on the moors, but that's okay. I'm here.

Flashback: Wasilla

I was in Alaska only a few years after Sarah Palin had been the Republican nominee for Vice President, so we'd all heard of Wasilla, where she'd been mayor before becoming governor of Alaska. I seem to remember we saw her house across the water.

But we weren't in Wasilla to look up the Palins, we were there to visit Iditarod headquarters. We got to see lots of sled dogs and hold puppies, and go on a short training ride with one of the dog teams. There wasn't any snow yet, obviously, so the dogs pulled a wagon instead of a sled, which conveniently had room for four extra riders. It was tremendous fun; I'm not sure I've ever wanted to do anything as much as those dogs wanted to RUN.

I wasn't kidding about the guns

There was an entire wall of these guns. They also had quite a few bow and arrow sets—I guess for a game of Cowboys and Indians. And for a mere $15, you could buy a rope that had been used by a genuine cowboy.

Guns and meat

I marveled at all the new varieties of junk food I saw on this trip, and while Wall Drug seemed to be lacking in the chips category, there was an impressive selection of flavored processed meats for sale.

And toy guns. I'm an out of touch coastal elite, of course, so I did find this a little shocking. Not surprising, sadly.

Wall Drug

What started as a small drugstore offering free ice water to travelers in Wall, South Dakota is now a huge shopping complex offering Western clothes, a playground with an 80-foot dinosaur, a chapel, an art gallery, and excellent homemade donuts.

I think it was probably the strangest place we visited on our road trip and this was an itinerary that included the Corn Palace and the Spam Museum.

Welcome to the Corn Palace

Thank you to Mary Kay for providing such a cheerful welcome, and letting me take a picture of her and the Fourth of July flags in her hair.

And for the popcorn, which ensured that when you walk into the Corn Palace, you smell...corn.

I also want to mention that I didn't eat any popcorn because we had just had really excellent Mexican food, which I did not expect in Mitchell, South Dakota.

Inside the Corn Palace

There are more murals, and exhibits covering the history of the building. The combination auditorium/basketball court that takes up much of the building also serves as the gift shop.

The Sydney Opera House, in corn

This closeup of one of the mosaics shows how they do it. Twelve different colors of corn, grown locally, are used and the designs are created by local artists. The corn cobs are split lengthwise and then nailed to the walls.

The Corn Palace

The Corn Palace, in tiny Mitchell, South Dakota (well, tiny by my standards—its 15,000 inhabitants make it the seventh largest city in South Dakota) is the last of what was once a series of “crop palaces” across the Midwest, built to promote their cities and the local agriculture.

All of the art on the facade, depicting the wonders of the world, is made out of corn. The theme changes every year, and new corn mosaics are created.

Changing of the guard

I honestly don't remember if I've ever seen the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace—maybe once or twice if I happened to be passing by, and I doubt I stayed for the whole thing.

But I enjoyed the Windsor version, even though it was crowded and I didn't have a clear view. Also, it was maybe fifteen minutes from hearing the first drumbeats up the High Street to the last red jackets disappearing inside the castle. I'm not a big fan of parades in general, so consider brevity a virtue.

Approaching Stonehenge

I have wanted to visit Stonehenge ever since I took some astronomy classes in college. It may or may not have functioned as a prehistoric observatory, or as a religious site, or as a place of healing—or, all of the above—but it had such a fascination for me. For years, at every solstice, I'd think, “I wish I were at Stonehenge.”

And when I caught this first glimpse of the stones through the bus window, I couldn't breathe for a moment. There's such a thrill in seeing a place you've seen pictures of all your life: the pyramids, Mont St-Michel, Machu Picchu, even the White House. Oh my God, there it is! I'm really here!