"Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth;

they fit like a snail to its shell."¹

When Virginia Stephen was climbing the moor, step by step in November 1904, she was not only visiting the house of a great writer but tracing the spirals of a snail. Each step towards the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth was a slow but an expanding movement into another writer’s memory. In her essay “Haworth, November 1904,” Woolf writes that “Haworth and the Brontës are somehow inextricably mixed. Haworth expresses the Brontës; the Brontës express Haworth; they fit like a snail to its shell” (n. pag.). This image, encapsulates what would become one of the central motifs of Woolf’s own writing: the act of recording, remembering, and returning. Following the traces of a snail, “[a]s if to keep a record of all the moves it makes,” Woolf was discovering the shape of her own artistic shell in which memories, feelings, and sensations were slowly absorbed within its widening spiral (Özyurt Kılıç n. pag.). Thus, I claim, Woolf’s intellectual “pilgrimage” to the Bronte parsonage, develops into a formed consciousness in which sensations, emotions, and lived experiences are archived, and preserved through a slow and attentive endurance of the moments of being (Woolf “Haworth” n. pag.). Furthermore, this sensitivity of Woolf to record, and remember continues to echo through contemporary artists who seek to trace widening spirals of a snail, and connect the dots of being.

Walking through the Keighley, observing the “ugly yellow-brown stone[s]” and “pallid and inanimate collection of objects” in the Parsonage, Woolf traces not the materiality of Haworth and the museum but the pulse of vitality and vibrations of what once lived. For her, “the most touching case - so touching that one hardly feels reverent in one's gaze - is that which contains the little personal relics of the dead woman” (“Haworth” n. pag.). Standing where once the Bronte sisters stood, Woolf does not merely observe the literary history but absorbs the living texture which resonates with memories of a woman, a lost human being. The Parsonage, thus, transforms into a space of sensations, and a living archive echoing Woolf’s bowl “that one fills and fills and fills” with memories (“A Sketch” 64). In that respect, the Parsonage, which records and remembers, recalls Bachelard’s idea that “the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us” (14). Just as Bachelard sees the house as an archive of embodied memories, Woolf recognises the Parsonage as a shell where the Brontes’ consciousness remain absorbed in relics that “outlived” them (“Haworth” n. pag.).

Woolf’s archival sensitivity, reading the space, and objects as repositories of feelings, becomes few of the spirals that widen her artistic shell. In “A Sketch of the Past,” which was written decades after her visit to Haworth, Woolf frames the idea in the form of a sketch of how past and present continually interweave. “[W]e are sealed vessels afloat upon what it is convenient to call reality; at some moments, without a reason, without an effort, the sealing matter cracks,” she writes, and through that crack, Charlotte Bronte’s “shoes and her thin muslin dress,” and Emily’s “little oak stool which [she] carried with her on her solitary moorland tramps, and on which she sat if not to write, as they say, to think,” are revealed as the repercussions of moments of being, past felt in the present (“A Sketch” 142; “Haworth” n. pag.). Thus, tracing the vibrations of objects, Woolf transforms these relics into what she would later call “scene-making,” a way of “marking the past” (“A Sketch” 142).

This rhythm of recording, and marking the past, finds it fullest expression transformed into fiction in To the Lighthouse. The Ramsays’ house, just like the Parsonage, absorbs the vitality of the family into its walls, windows, corridors, and furniture, and into its shell. When Mrs. Ramsay dies, “the house, without its human occupants, [loses] its purpose,” echoing what Woolf observed in the Parsonage where space, and residents were “inextricably mixed” (Sheehan 53; “Haworth” n. pag.). Thus, the house itself becomes an archive of Mrs. Ramsay’s being. In that respect, both spaces breathe with the lived experiences, and “cotton wools of daily life,” and become one’s archive of their own, one that they remember, and return (Woolf “A Sketch” 72).

It is, perhaps, in this very rhythm that many contemporary artists trace, and retrace the marks left by Woolf, and return to the archive of their own sensations and thoughts through slow, but attentive search for the moments of being. Each contemporary work, thus, turns into a bowl that one fills with the textures of life, and experiences. Through this archive, past remains present in an ever-widening spiral of the snail where memory, and creativity are continuously intertwined. As Woolf ends her essay with “"however harsh the struggle, [Brontes] above all, fought to victory," the contemporary artists too, survive in a space where past struggles shape the present (“Haworth” n. pag.). Yet, as the spiral expands through the spaces we inhabit, the memories we perpetuate, and the art we create, the victory, too, continues.

Source¹

Works Cited

Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994.

Özyurt Kılıç, Mine. “A Snail Around the Flowerbed of Literature: The Hogarth Press’s Call to

Slowness,” Woolf Arts Archive, https://www.woolfartsarchive.org/snail-around-the-flowerbed-of-

literature. Accessed 1 Nov. 2025.

Sheehan, Paul. “Time as Protagonist in To the Lighthouse.” The Cambridge Companion to To

The Lighthouse. Edited by Allison Pease. Cambridge UP, 2015.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past.” Moments of Being. Edited by Jeanne Schulkind.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985.

---. “Haworth, November 1904.” University of Pennsylvania Library, 21 Dec. 1904. Web.

Accessed 1 Nov. 2025. https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/woolf/VW-Bronte.html.