The ‘Charlotte’ cult: writing the literary pilgrimage, from Gaskell to Woolf

This chapter considers how writers and literary tourists imagined Charlotte Brontë during the fifty years after her death. It is framed by Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of CharlotteBrontë and Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘Haworth, 1904’, both writers assessing Brontë’s legacy as an author. While Gaskell’s biography unleashed the ‘Charlotte’ cult, whose devotees became instrumental in the establishment of the Brontë Society in 1893 and the eventual opening of the parsonage as a museum, Woolf pondered the negative impact of literary tourism on the legacy of writers. For decades after her death, literary tourists sought traces of Brontë’s ghostly presence in Haworth, initiating the creation of the parsonage as literary shrine and a tourist industry based on the notion of literary pilgrimage. Analysing a range of accounts of visits to Haworth, along with obituaries, this chapter argues that Brontë’s reputation was initially shaped by myths and misconceptions as much as by her literary works.