THE BRONTË Parsonage Museum will this weekend launch a new exhibition about the battle of Waterloo.

The Haworth museum is commemorating the 200th anniversary of the battle by focusing on its links with the Brontë family.

The Brontës, War and Waterloo explores the Brontë family’s fascination with war and how the bloody battles and heroic figureheads of the Napoleonic conflicts captivated and inspired the collective Brontë siblings.

Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s collections manager, accepted that the Napoleonic conflicts took place far away from the moors of Yorkshire but said the Brontës had access to military accounts in periodicals and newspapers.

She said: “Their imaginations were fuelled by what they read and they recreated events with toy soldiers, transforming the Napoleonic campaigns into exciting fantasy sagas.

“This is an exciting exhibition which shows how this fascination with war and warfare continued into adulthood and influenced their writing.”

The exhibition has been curated with the assistance of Brontë scholar Emma Butcher, who believes the exhibition brings new insight to the Brontë story.

She said: “The violent, masculine landscapes of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre can be traced back to the Brontës’ early engagement with militarism and warfare.

“This exhibition presents the work of the Brontë siblings in a new light and establishes them as significant post-war authors.”

Items displayed as part of the exhibition include a fragment of Napoleon’s coffin that was given to Charlotte Brontë while she was in Brussels, and a letter to Patrick Brontë from the Duke of Wellington.

There is also a fragment from Charlotte Brontë’s History of the Year 1829 which recounts the moment when Branwell showed his new toy soldiers to his sisters.

The Brontes, War and Waterloo opens in the Bonnell Room at the Bronte Parsonage Museum on Monday. (March 16). The current exhibition The Brontës and Animals finishes today.

Entrance to the new exhibition is free with the price of museum admission.