I have previously blogged about the Bronte family, with the focus on their home village of Haworth. However, one of the sisters, Anne Bronte, spent many a happy time on the Yorkshire coast at Scarborough, where she found the sea air beneficial for her tuberculosis. Sadly, the disease got the better of her in the end, and having spent her final days there, she now lies buried in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church.
Bronte’s novel Agnes Grey does not mention Scarborough by name, but the castle where Weston proposes to Agnes is unmistakably Scarborough Castle. In her other novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, the coastal scenes and the seaside excursions undertaken by the characters are clearly inspired by Scarborough.
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| Scarborough Castle, Scarborough, Yorkshire - geograph.org.uk. Photo by Christine Matthews, via Wikimedia Commons. |
Scarborough is one of the main resort towns on the Yorkshire coast. The reason it was so popular in Anne’s day is that it was a spa town, added to which the arrival of the railway in 1845 really propelled its prominence as a resort. Scarborough is still reachable today by train from York.
