00:00I'm Anne Dinsdale and I'm the Principal Curator at The Parsonage. I've been 35 years and I've
00:08been involved in curating our current exhibition. We've got some really fantastic displays around
00:16the house but this is our new exhibition and it's called From Haworth to Eternity.
00:22So we're looking at the idea that Haworth was a hard-working industrial township.
00:29It was never seen as a romantic place until the Bronte novels were published in 1847.
00:38The novels were published under pseudonyms but by 1850 it had gradually begun to leak out that
00:46they were the work of three clergyman's daughters living in the north of England.
00:53Emily and Anne were already dead by this point but people started coming to Haworth even during
01:00Charlotte Bronte's lifetime hoping to catch her going in and out of church. So she was the only
01:07one of the Brontes that experienced literary celebrity and when she died in 1855 that process
01:16was inflamed by the publication of Mrs Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte which
01:26kind of made the Bronte story known to the reading public for the very first time.
01:32So the story of these three tragic women living in this remote Yorkshire parsonage amidst all this
01:40wild moorland scenery and rather than kind of putting people off it actually encouraged people
01:49to visit Haworth and to see for themselves where the Brontes had lived and where they'd written
01:55their novels and I think it's true to say that the Brontes have had a huge impact on the way
02:02that people perceive this kind of moorland scenery here at Haworth. So the new exhibition
02:09looks at the impact of the Brontes on Haworth itself and all the various film and TV adaptations
02:19which have kind of fed into that process and driven tourists to Haworth in increasing numbers
02:27but of course nowadays that's kind of taken on a momentum of its own. So although it was
02:34initially the Brontes which brought people from all over the world to come here and there are
02:40now other attractions you know the iconic Main Street with its shops and restaurants, the Worth
02:47Valley Steam Railway and of course the moorland. We've got some really interesting items included
02:56in the exhibition. A rare screenplay from the very first film adaptation of Wuthering Heights
03:03which was made in Haworth in 1920 and the original film is lost so the screenplay you know is really
03:12important it provides all the information we need to actually remake the film and we've got some
03:19stills from that as well and we've got the production script from the 1940s Jane Eyre film
03:28starring Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine. You know sort of Hollywood 1940s people were reading the
03:38Bronte novels, they were hugely popular in the war years and you know that's kind of reflected
03:44in the fact that all these films were appearing. So Wuthering Heights with Laurence Olivier and
03:51Merle Auberon you know just to name a few of the big adaptations.
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