THE 90TH birthday of the Brontë Parsonage Museum will kick off this year’s summer festival weekend by the Brontë Society.

Leading Brontë figures Ann Dinsdale and Jane Sellers will be at a special event to discuss the Haworth museum ‘then and now’.

Ann is the museum’s principal curator while Jane, currently Curator of Cultural Services at Harrogate Borough Council, is a former director of the Brontë Society.

At an event in the nearby West Lane Baptist Centre on June 8 at 3pm, the pair will discuss Haworth in the 1920s and the museum’s journey since then.

The Parsonage opened to the public for the first time on August 4, 1928 to cater for the stream of pilgrims who had been visiting Haworth for the previous 75 years. At last, enthusiasts were able to look round the very rooms in which the Brontë family had lived, written and worked.

The Brontë Society was founded in 1893 to organise a permanent home for the sisters’ manuscripts, letters and personal belongings.

The first museum opened in 1895 above the Yorkshire Penny Bank on Haworth Main Street. By the following summer 10,000 visitors had passed through.

In 1928 the Church put up for sale Haworth Parsonage at a price of £3000, and it was bought by Sir James Roberts, a Haworth-born wool merchant and lifetime Brontë Society member, who handed the Society the deeds.

Visit bronte.org.uk/whats-on or call 01535 642323 to book tickets.