Shibden Hall, near Halifax, West Yorkshire. The home of diarist Anne Lister, this rambling Tudor manor house would have been known to the Brontës and is sometimes suggested as the original of Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights. Like another much more impressive local mansion, High Sunderland, it was close to the school at Law Hill where Emily Brontë taught for several months from September 1838, and Valérie Hazette feels that while Emily may have got some details of the Grange from the grander mansion (demolished in 1950), the fifteenth-century Shibden Hall would have made "the perfect Imaginary [sic] template" for her novel (100). Lister's biographer Angela Steidele feels that its owner's life-story influenced Charlotte Brontë as well, particularly in her characterisation of Shirley Keeldar in Shirley (see Steidele 253).
Photograph © Alexander P. Kapp, first posted on the Geograph website, and kindly made available for reuse on the Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0) Creative Commons licence. Text by Jacqueline Banerjee. [Click on the image to enlarge it.]
Bibliography
Hazette, Valérie V. Wuthering Heights on Film and Television: A Journey across Time and Cultures. Bristol: Intellect, 2015. [Review.
Paperback. xiv + 359pp. Barker, Juliet. The Brontës. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994.Steidele, Angela. Gentleman Jack: A Biography of Anne Lister: Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist. Trans. Katy Derbyshire. London: Serpents Tail, 2018.
Created 8 June 2022