A new side of Charlotte Brontë, showing the author of Jane Eyre’s unexpected penchant for colourful, fashionable, even “sensual” clothing, is revealed in a new exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
Displaying everything from Charlotte’s bright pink wrapper, which she would have worn around the house, to the extraordinary item known as an “ugly bonnet” which was the height of fashion at the time and which she sported to protect herself from the Yorkshire weather, the exhibition opened this week at the Brontës’ home in Haworth, West Yorkshire.
