The Brontës and the Lake District: The Connections Nobody Tells You About

Brontë Country and the Lake District are usually treated as separate literary kingdoms: the sisters belong to the Yorkshire moors, the Lakes to Wordsworth and Beatrix Potter, and never the twain shall meet. In fact, the twain met repeatedly – and consequentially. Charlotte Brontë's most important literary friendship began at a house above Windermere; Branwell Brontë lived and worked on the Lake District's edge and spent a golden day with a poet at Rydal Water; and the most famous piece of bad advice in literary history was posted to Haworth from Keswick. As a Lake District tour company that runs dedicated Brontë tours, these crossings are close to our heart – and they make the journey from the Lakes into Brontë Country feel less like leaving one story and more like following it. Here are the genuine Brontë–Lakeland connections.

Southey's letter from Keswick: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life"

Begin with the most notorious. In December 1836, twenty-year-old Charlotte Brontë, burning with secret ambition, wrote to Robert Southey – Poet Laureate of England, resident at Greta Hall in Keswick at the heart of the Lakes – enclosing her verses and asking, in effect, whether she dared hope to be a writer. Southey's reply from Keswick in March 1837 was courteous, considered – and crushing: he conceded her talent, then delivered the sentence that has echoed ever since: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." A woman's proper duties, he explained, would leave no room for it. Charlotte wrote back with heartbreaking meekness, promising to try to suppress her ambitions – and kept the correspondence all her life, annotating Southey's letter to the effect that it was kind and admirable. Then, being Charlotte, she went on to ignore it completely. Ten years later Jane Eyre conquered the world. The exchange remains a set text in the history of women's writing – and it gives every literary traveller in Keswick a wry moment: from this lovely town, the establishment told the Brontës to stop.

Branwell at Broughton-in-Furness – and his day with a Coleridge at Rydal

The only Brontë actually to live in the Lake District was the brother. In January 1840 Branwell Brontë took a post as tutor to the sons of Robert Postlethwaite at Broughton House in Broughton-in-Furness, the handsome little market town on the National Park's south-western edge. He lasted barely six months before dismissal – the pattern of his life – but the stay produced his happiest literary memory. Branwell, who translated the Roman poet Horace, made contact with Hartley Coleridge, son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and a gifted, wayward poet in his own right, who lived at Nab Cottage on the shore of Rydal Water between Ambleside and Grasmere. On May Day 1840 Branwell spent the day with Hartley at the Nab, talking poetry and translation; Hartley was encouraging about his Horace – perhaps the only real literary encouragement Branwell ever received from beyond the parsonage. Guests on our tours pass Nab Cottage constantly on the Ambleside–Grasmere road; its whitewashed front, gazing over Rydal Water, hides one of the most poignant footnotes in the Brontë story: the golden afternoon of the family's doomed son. (Branwell had also, characteristically, written to Wordsworth himself in 1837 enclosing verses; the great man, offended by the letter's wild flattery, never replied.)

Charlotte at Windermere, 1850: the meeting that made the legend

The most consequential Brontë–Lakeland moment came in August 1850. Charlotte – by then famous as the unmasked author of Jane Eyre, and utterly bereaved, having buried Branwell, Emily and Anne within the previous two years – was invited to the Lake District by Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, staying at Briery Close, a house above the eastern shore of Windermere near Low Wood, between Windermere town and Ambleside. There, on her first evening, she met a fellow guest: the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell. The two women – the tiny, shy, grief-worn Yorkshirewoman and the warm, sociable Manchester author – took to each other immediately; they talked for days, boated on Windermere, and began the friendship that would define Charlotte's posthumous fame. Gaskell's letters describing that visit contain the first great pen-portrait of Charlotte – her smallness, her soft voice, her sadness – and when Charlotte died five years later it was Gaskell whom old Patrick Brontë asked to write her life. The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), the book that turned a family into a legend and Haworth into a pilgrimage, was seeded on the shores of Windermere – a few minutes' drive from where our own tours begin. During the same visit Charlotte was taken about the neighbourhood and glimpsed the Lakes celebrity circuit, meeting the aged Matthew Arnold family circle at Fox How near Ambleside; characteristically, she found the scenery magnificent and the socialising an ordeal.

Cowan Bridge: the tragedy on the Lakes road

One more link binds the two regions, and it is the saddest. The Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge – where the two eldest Brontë girls, Maria and Elizabeth, contracted the tuberculosis that killed them in 1825, and which Charlotte immortalised as Lowood in Jane Eyre – stands near Kirkby Lonsdale on the old road between the Lake District and Yorkshire. Travellers heading from the Lakes into Brontë Country pass close to it: a row of cottages by a bridge, marked with a plaque, unassuming and chilling. For the Brontë pilgrim coming from Windermere, it means the story begins almost as soon as the journey does.

Two literary landscapes, one unmissable day

So the map redraws itself: Keswick posted the discouragement, Rydal hosted the brother, Windermere hatched the biography, and the Lowood road runs between. If you are holidaying in the Lake District and love the Brontës, you are not far from their world – you are already inside its margins. Our small-group Brontë tours depart from Windermere and Ambleside with a maximum of six guests and carry you into the heart of Brontë Country, with these Lakeland threads woven into the storytelling along the way. The Brontë Society preserves the letters and manuscripts behind every episode above. Come for the Lakes; meet the Brontës on the way – they got here first.

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.