The House of Wuthering Heights, in the county of Yorkshire, is for sale. The “true paradise of the perfect misanthrope”, 466 square meters and 10 bedrooms, is called Ponden Hall in the century and the asking price is over a million pounds. It’s a lot? Is it cheap? Difficult to say. The fascination of literary houses is a mysterious thing to grasp. In addition, in the case of Ponden Hall / Wuthering Heights, the house would not only coincide with the place where Emily Brontë’s novel is set, but also with the house where the three most famous sisters in English literature lived and where Emily he wrote this which is his first and only book, between October 1845 and June 1946, just two years before he died of tuberculosis with his sister Anne and brother Bramwell.
How much truthful and how much mythological there is in the fact that Ponden Hall was truly the house that inspired Heatcliff’s home is ultimately not that relevant. Since everyone now thinks it is, it has become that home and is a pilgrimage destination for book lovers. A bit like going to Bath in the footsteps of Jane Austen.
The charm of the place also derives from its location, on top of a hill in the middle of the moor, where many views and environments correspond to the descriptions that have made it immortal: “I believe that in all of England I could never find a a place so far removed from all worldly noise “. One of the rooms of the novel in particular – the one where Mr. Lockwood is housed on the night of the storm, when the ghost of his beloved Catherine, beating against the window, appears in his dream – looks like one of the bedrooms in Ponden Hall.
The farmhouse, located in Stanbury, was bought in 1998 by Julie Akhurst and Steve Brown, who had restored it emphasizing the affinities with Wuthering Heights and in 2014 made it a B&B for enthusiasts, a destination for literary pilgrimages (such as fans of Jane Austen go to Bath).
The house dates back to 1634 and many documents prove that the Brontë lived at least for a period in Ponden, where the family was displaced to escape a landslide, resulting from several days of rain. Now Julie and Steve would like to sell to retire, but without completely severing the bond that binds them to the house. Indeed, in this period they would also like to have “a room of their own” to study the history of Ponden Hall in depth and perhaps write it.
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