Patrick's stairs

My favorite part of the Brontë Parsonage Museum

In the summer of 1970, I spent two weeks at my grandmother’s house in Greenville, South Carolina. Just the two of us. One afternoon, we climbed in her 1952 Packard and drove a few blocks up Augusta Road for the afternoon matinee at the Plaza Theatre.

The new Wuthering Heights movie starring Timothy Dalton—be still, my heart—and Anna Calder-Marshall had come to town. I loved the moors and stone houses, young Heathcliff and Cathy, Nelly’s Yorkshire patter, the slow-burning build to Catherine’s death and Heathcliff’s agony, and the brazen amorality of the story itself. I loved it all.

When Grandmommy and I got back home, she asked if I’d like to read the book. She had long subscribed to Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, and Wuthering Heights was included in a recent edition. Thus I was introduced to Emily Brontë’s masterpiece through (1) a condensed version of the novel and (2) a movie that omitted the second half of the story—for which I have apologized to the author, in an existential sort of way, many times.

Over the next few years, I read the full version of Wuthering Heights, the other Brontë novels, and some of their poetry. That led me to other Victorian novelists and a deep appreciation for British literature in general. When I was in graduate school, a professor told me about the Brontë Society. I wrote to Haworth—pronouncing it Hayworth in my head—and requested an application form, which I promptly received, completed, and returned.

That was thirty-three years ago, and I still have my acceptance letter: “Dear Miss Huggins, you will be pleased to learn that your recent application for membership of the Brontë Society has been accepted, and your 1990 membership card is enclosed.” Whew! I could stop worrying about being rejected.

My first opportunity to visit the Brontë Parsonage Museum was in February of 1993. I was the only visitor at the parsonage that afternoon, probably because of the winter weather. The staff, bless their hearts, let me just wander from room to room, back and forth, upstairs and downstairs, to my heart’s content.

I’ve been back to Haworth several times since then, both to do research and just to visit. I’m always blown away by the latest additions to the collection—that tiny book!—and the world-class exhibitions, and I could easily spend thousands of dollars in the shop. The staff are friendly and knowledgeable, and the leadership team, especially in recent years, is simply the best of the best.

But the thing I love more than anything else is these stairs.

Staircase connecting ground floor and first floor.

When I was a kid, we never lived in a house with stairs. Everything was always on one floor, but my grandmother’s house was different. The shared space—living room, dining room, kitchen—was all on the ground floor, and a staircase led upstairs to the bedrooms. I grew up thinking of those stairs as a portal to the more intimate top floor where things were quieter, more peaceful.

I could climb those stairs and spend the afternoon reading, writing in my journal, or just taking a nap. Upstairs is for the private events of our lives—whispered conversations, births, wedding nights, deaths. Only immediate family members go upstairs. No visitors allowed.

When my wife and I built our home almost twenty years ago, we put two bedrooms and a reading loft upstairs. At first we wanted railing across the front edge of the loft, which overlooks the living room with a cathedral ceiling. But Lloyd, our builder and a very wise man, advised us to put a half wall there instead. “You don’t want folks seeing up there, do you? That’s private space.” I’ve always been glad that we took his advice.

When I’m in the Brontë parsonage and I look at the stairs, I see Tabby, tired to the bone, slowly hauling herself upstairs to bed at the end of a long day of work. I hear Patrick call to his children “Don’t stay up too late” as he climbs the stairs, pausing halfway up to wind the grandfather clock. I see four young children playing on the stairs, running up and down, and then dashing into the children’s study and throwing themselves on the bed amid peals of laughter. I see Charlotte carefully coming down those stairs in her wedding dress.

I also see Maria, mother of the six Brontë children, slowly ascending those stairs one last time, holding tightly to the handrail, and going into the bedroom where she died in 1821. I see Patrick, in 1825, gently carry his two oldest daughters, first Maria and then Elizabeth, upstairs to the bedroom where they would soon die. Aunt Branwell died upstairs in 1842, Branwell in 1848, and Charlotte in 1855.

As the patriarch of the family, it was likely that Patrick was the first Brontë to climb those stairs, when the family moved into the parsonage in 1820. Upon his death in 1861, he became the last. I think of them as his stairs.

The hall floor and steps are sand-stone, “always beautifully clean,” according to Ellen Nussey, a lifelong friend of Charlotte. The front edge of each step is gracefully worn down from well over two hundred years of people climbing upstairs, walking downstairs, climbing upstairs, walking downstairs. Not to mention Keeper, Grasper, Flossy, an assortment of cats, and perhaps even the geese Victoria and Adelaide on occasion.

When I’m on the ground floor of the parsonage, I imagine the family members engaged in typical early-nineteenth-century activity. Some of it involves non-family members—chatting with visitors, writing letters to friends. And much of the work involved in maintaining a household—cooking and baking, cleaning, laundry, paying bills—took place on the ground floor.

But when I look at those well-worn stairs, that portal to the private upstairs rooms, that’s when I best sense the spirit of a remarkable family whose creative genius—brought to life in their fiction, poetry, art, and music—has been so carefully protected and preserved for future generations.

That’s why I love Patrick’s stairs.