The Brontës: Wild Genius on the Moors: The Story of a Literary Family

by Juliet Barker

The old heart of Penzance, centred around Chapel Street and Market Jew Street, is also relatively unchanged though engulfed by the larger modern town. Chapel Street itself is like something out of a picture book, steep, narrow and cobbled, winding up from the quay to the Market Place and lined with higgledy-piggledy eighteenth-century cottages. Most are built of granite though some, like number 25 where the Branwells lived, are faced with brick. Apart from this pretension to gentility, the house is simple and of a kind with its neighbours, having five rooms on each floor, two attic rooms and a south-facing walled garden to the rear. At the front, like its neighbours, it is straight on to the street. Originally, the house backed on to the graveyard of the ancient Chapel of St Mary but now it is dwarfed by the new parish church built on the chapel site in 1835.81 Above it, Chapel Street climbs past the picturesque smugglers’ inn, the Admiral Benbow, and the faded grandeur of the Union Hotel before opening out into the commercial bustle of Market Jew Street. With all that the town had to offer and a climate so famously mild that camellias bloom in February, Penzance must have been a very pleasant home for the Branwell family. The impression one gets of life there when Maria and her sisters were young is of a whirl of social entertainment and visiting of the sort so vividly described by Jane Austen. Maria, too, with her ready wit, charming manners and simple piety could have b...