Here’s how Hathersage inspired Jane Eyre

This month marks the bicentenary of the birth of Charlotte Brontë – and to mark the occasion, Nicola Lisle explores the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte’s greatest novel, Jane Eyre.

MUCH of the Brontë sisters’ literary output was shaped by their lonely, motherless upbringing in what Charlotte later described as the “little, wild moorland village” of Haworth in Yorkshire. Yet it was a single visit to Hathersage, in the summer of 1845, that inspired many of the names, places and events in Charlotte’s second and most famous novel, Jane Eyre…