THE future of a former museum building with strong links to the Brontes will be debated next week.
Red House Museum, at Gomersal, which closed nearly three years ago due to budget cuts, will be discussed at a meeting of Kirklees Council on Wednesday. The building is set to be put on the market.
The house was once the home of intrepid feminist and author Mary Taylor, a close friend of Jane Eyre author Charlotte Bronte.
Charlotte was a frequent visitor to Red House in the 1830s when Mary lived there.
Mary contributed articles to Emily Faithfull’s Victoria Magazine in which she championed feminist issues, as well as women’s suffrage and also property rights.
She is reported to have worked on her only novel, Miss Miles, or A Tale of Yorkshire Life Sixty Years Ago, for 40 years before it was published in 1890.
Charlotte is said to have based her novel Shirley on 17th-century Red House and its gardens, which she saw as a contrast to her own family’s Haworth parsonage.
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