THE BRONTË sisters’ writing table took pride of place when the Parsonage Museum reopened on Sunday.

Visitors were able to see the drop-leaf table in its original setting where the Brontë sisters sat to write some of their greatest works.

The Haworth museum had opened its doors after a short winter break for essential maintenance and to have its collections refreshed.

The mahogany table, where classics such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily’s Wuthering Heights were written, permanently returned to its rightful place last week after more than 150 years.

It left the Brontë ’s home in a sale that took place when Patrick Brontë died in 1861.

The table returned to the Parsonage on loan in 1997 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of Jane Eyre, but thanks to a £580,000 grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund – secured by the Brontë Society – it has finally been bought.

Museum spokesman, Rebecca Yorke, said: “Its return is really significant. It’s one of the most important literary artefacts of the 19th century.

“We know from diary papers the sisters would walk round the table when their father had gone to bed to read each other what they had written every day.

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“When Emily died, Anne and Charlotte continued the tradition and then, when Anne died, Charlotte did it by herself. It was a very particular part of their routine.

“When it arrived last week, it was a beautiful table, but now it has been dressed with the sisters’ writing things and cups and saucers in the dining room where it would have originally been, it looks absolutely stunning.”

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has several rooms set out as they were at the time the sisters were writing.

Last year’s exhibition – The Brontë s and Animals – is continuing and a new exhibition, entitled Heathcliff Adrift, was commissioned as part of the museum’s contemporary arts programme.

Heathcliff Adrift is a collection of poetry by award-winning writer Benjamin Myers, and follows the missing three years of Emily Brontë’s hero from Wuthering Heights, accompanied by a series of landscape photographs by Yorkshire photographer Nick Small.

It looks at what could have happened to Heathcliff at that time when the industrial revolution was in its earliest days and the ragged landscape was under threat from the arrival of mechanisation. The exhibition opens on Saturday and will run until June.