Last week, I introduced a series on my blog exploring where noted writers through history wrote their works. My first article focused on Sissinghurst Castle, home of Vita Sackville-West, and took a look at the tower that she claimed as her own private writing space.

Such a statuesque and grand ‘room of one’s own’ (Virginia Woolf) is out of reach for most writers, however. Today, in contrast, I’m visiting two much more humble homes where great works of English literature were written: the parsonage at Haworth, home to the Brontë sisters, and Chawton Cottage, home to Jane Austen.

Haworth is a village in West Yorkshire, and there Patrick Brontë moved with his wife, Maria Branwell, to take up the post of perpetual curate in 1820. Accommodation came with the post, and so it was that Emily, Charlotte and Anne Brontë, along with their brother Branwell, grew up in the parsonage at Haworth.

Maria passed away when the Brontë children were young, and their aunt, Elizabeth Branwell, moved into the parsonage to care for them. Early on, storytelling became a passion of the children, and they invented their own fictional worlds: the African kingdom of Glass Town, the Empire of Angria and the North Pacific island of Gonda, which was ruled by women. The budding writers penned their stories on paper and bound them into tiny books (see this article from the Harvard Gazette for a glimpse).

Patrick’s income as a curate was very modest, which meant once they came of age the Brontë sisters had to find positions in teaching – at schools and working with families as a governess. Charlotte had the idea to create a school at the parsonage for young girls, but eventually this idea was shelved: Elizabeth Branwell died, Branwell had developed a problem with drink and drugs, and Patrick lost his sight – in short, the sisters were needed at home to care for the men.

Their ambitions in education may have been curtailed, but the Brontë sisters soon found common ground in their passion for writing. In 1846, they published a collection of poems under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. They sold a grand total of two copies, but the flame of inspiration was lit: just a year later saw the publication of Charlotte’s Jane Eyre, Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s Agnes Grey.

It was at her father’s bedside in Manchester that Charlotte began writing Jane Eyre; Patrick had undergone an operation to remove cataracts and had to lie in a darkened room for weeks as his eyes healed. But the sisters did most of their writing at the parsonage.

The dining table was a popular spot. Not only was it a place for writing, but it was a place for brainstorming; the sisters would gather there in the evening and discuss their writing. Emily used to walk around the table, and her sisters adopted the habit too. (After Emily and Anne died, Charlotte continued to walk around the table alone; the Brontës’ servant, Martha Brown, told their biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘my heart aches to hear Miss Brontë walking, walking on alone’).

Charlotte also had her own writing desk at the parsonage – small, simple and made of mahogany. You can see the desk in this BBC article, and you can see plenty of photos of the restored parsonage in this article by Country Life and on the website of the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

Of course, while the Brontës wrote at home, they found plenty of inspiration outside the parsonage. Emily’s Wuthering Heights is rooted in the wild, brooding beauty of the surrounding moors. Here is Top Withens, the ruins of the windswept farmhouse that is thought to have inspired Emily’s great novel.

As Country Life reports:

The moors still begin just behind the house – the Brontës’ childhood walks, sometimes by moonlight, and the views from the house were central to their vision of the world. Charlotte remarked to G. H. Lewes of the limitations of Jane Austen’s world and how one sees there only ‘a highly-cultivated garden and no open country’.

Like the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen grew up in a rectory. Her father was the rector of the parishes of Steventon and Deane in Hampshire, and, like Patrick Branwell, made a very modest living. Jane wrote the first drafts of Pride and Prejudice, Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility in the 1790s while living at the Steventon rectory (which is no longer standing), but then in 1880 her father decided to retire and he moved his family to Bath. Jane was not happy to be leaving her childhood home, and she wrote very little in Bath.

In 1805, Jane’s father died, leaving Jane, her sister and her mother in financial insecurity. Eventually, in 1809, Jane’s brother Edward set the family up in a cottage near his estate, Chawton House in Hampshire.

Life in Chawton was quiet, giving Jane the perfect opportunity to work on her writing. In Literary Britain and Ireland, Jane Struthers and Chris Coe write of Jane’s writing space at Chawton Cottage:

Space was limited so [Jane] had to write in the sitting room she shared with her mother and sister, and she would hastily tidy away her papers whenever anyone entered the room…

It is striking that Jane felt the need to tidy away her writing whereas the Brontës shared theirs. It seems clear that Jane would have been better suited to ‘a room of one’s own’. Still, she managed to make the little sitting room at Chawton Cottage work for her, as finally, in 1811, after much effort trying to get a publisher to take on a woman’s book, she saw the publication of her first novel, Sense and Sensibility – followed in 1813 by Pride and Prejudice, in 1814 by Mansfield Park and in 1815 by Emma. (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion were published after Jane’s death in 1817.)

Like Haworth, Chawton Cottage has been restored and is open to the public as the Jane Austen’s House Museum. There, you can see many objects relating to Jane, including the tiny occasional table she used as a writing desk. Jane would position this table under the window with the best light and write, perhaps with a view of that ‘highly-cultivated garden’ mentioned by Charlotte Brontë – though it may not have been to Charlotte’s taste, it certainly seemed to inspire Jane to write.