The Brontës and America: A Transatlantic Love Story

Here is a story we delight in telling our American guests on the road into Brontë Country: you are not newcomers to this pilgrimage – your countrymen helped build it. America took to the Brontës instantly and passionately; an American publishing swindle triggered the most famous scene in the sisters' lives; American collectors preserved treasures that might otherwise have scattered; and one Philadelphia gentleman's bequest sits today at the heart of the Brontë Parsonage Museum itself. The Brontës never crossed the Atlantic – none of them ever left Europe – but the Atlantic crossed to them, early and often. Here is the American side of the Brontë story.

Jane Eyre conquers America – fast and unpaid

Jane Eyre appeared in London in October 1847; within months it was an American sensation. In the absence of international copyright law, US publishers could reprint British books freely and instantly – and they did, racing competing editions of Jane Eyre onto the market in early 1848, priced for everyone. The result mirrored what pirated Peter Rabbits would later do for Beatrix Potter: the Brontës earned little or nothing from their vast early American sales, but gained something money cannot buy – a mass American readership within a year of publication, arguing about Currer Bell across parlours from Boston to the frontier. American critics joined the identity guessing-game with gusto, and American demand for anything "by the author of Jane Eyre" became so hot that it set up the pivotal swindle of the sisters' career.

The American deal that unmasked the Bells

The famous July 1848 scene in which Charlotte and Anne travelled overnight to London and revealed themselves to Charlotte's astonished publisher – "we are three sisters" – was detonated by an American transaction. Emily and Anne's slippery publisher, Thomas Newby, had sold Anne's new novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall to an American house while implying it was the latest work of the author of Jane Eyre – effectively passing Acton Bell off as Currer to the eager US market. When word reached Charlotte's own publisher, who held rights expectations for Currer Bell's next book in America, the sisters' honesty was in question – and Charlotte and Anne went to London in person to prove the Bells were plural. In other words: the single most cinematic moment in Brontë biography exists because American readers wanted the Brontës so badly that a publisher lied to supply them. We find American guests receive this news with a certain guilty pride.

Henry Houston Bonnell: Philadelphia's gift to Haworth

Fast-forward to the era of collecting, and the American thread becomes a lifeline. Henry Houston Bonnell, a Philadelphia businessman, assembled with scholarly devotion one of the finest Brontë collections ever in private hands – manuscripts, letters, first editions, drawings and personal relics of the family. On his death in 1926, Bonnell did something extraordinary: he bequeathed the core of his collection not to an American institution but to the Brontë Society, to be housed at the parsonage in Haworth – which had opened as a museum only in 1928, receiving the Bonnell bequest as a founding treasure. The Bonnell Collection remains central to the Brontë Parsonage Museum today: when you stand in those rooms marvelling at manuscripts and family possessions, a substantial share of what you see is there because a Philadelphian loved the Brontës enough to send his life's collection home. A further portion of Bonnell's collection remains in his own city, so Philadelphia keeps a Brontë presence to this day – a pleasing symmetry with the city's great Beatrix Potter holdings, for travellers who collect literary coincidences.

The little books in New York

America's other great Brontë treasury sits in Manhattan. The Morgan Library & Museum on Madison Avenue – the collection built by financier J. P. Morgan – holds superb Brontë material, including examples of the sisters' and Branwell's miniature childhood manuscripts: the matchbox-sized magazines and sagas of Glass Town and Angria, written in script so tiny it defeats the naked eye. These little books are the secret origin of everything – the twenty-year private apprenticeship behind Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights – and the fact that a New York institution guards some of them means American Brontë pilgrims can begin their journey at home, standing before pages the young Charlotte sewed together at the parsonage dining table. Rare-book news-watchers will also recall the headline sales of recent years, as surviving miniature manuscripts have periodically come to auction and been secured for public collections on both sides of the Atlantic – the transatlantic custody of the Brontë legacy is a living story, not a settled one.

From Boston parlours to the Haworth omnibus

By the later nineteenth century, American literary tourism had discovered Haworth in force: US magazines ran pilgrimage accounts, transatlantic visitors climbed Main Street asking for anyone who remembered the family, and the visitors' books filled with American addresses – a tradition that has never paused since. Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), a bestseller in America too, supplied the itinerary: parsonage, church, moor. Today the Brontë Society counts members across the United States, and on any given day in Haworth you will hear American voices at the memorial chapel – the newest instalments of a 175-year-old devotion.

Continuing the tradition

So when American guests join our small-group Brontë tours from Windermere and Ambleside – a maximum of six guests, into the heart of Brontë Country – we tell them, truthfully, that they travel in distinguished company: the readers who made Currer Bell famous twice over, the swindled book-buyers who forced literature's best unmasking scene, and the Philadelphia collector whose generosity furnishes the parsonage they have come to see. The Brontës repaid America in the only currency they had – novels that took root there as deeply as anywhere on earth. Come and complete the exchange in person. The moors, unlike the first American editions, are entirely free of charge.

This article is part of our Brontë country guides collection – twenty in-depth guides researched and written by our local team. Browse the full library on our Travel Guide Library.