Lucy Powrie was 15 years old when she first read Anne Brontë’s 1847 novel Agnes Grey and instantly, intensely, fell in love. “There was just this moment of, I suppose, feeling like I’d come home. I’d found something that was just better than anything I had ever found in my life.”
Already a wildly enthusiastic reader, she had been blogging about books since the age of 12, and hosting a book review channel on YouTube since she was 13. Discovering Anne Brontë, followed immediately by her older sisters Emily and Charlotte, opened the door to a new world: “They were everything that I didn’t realise was out there.”
She started talking about them on her blog and channel, “and I realised very quickly that there were a lot of people who also loved the Brontës and wanted to talk about them because they didn’t have anybody to talk about them with [either].”
Powrie is still only 25 but – as is doubtless apparent – she is not a person who believes in hanging around. In October she was appointed the chair of the Brontë Parsonage Museum at the family’s former home in Haworth, making her the youngest leader of one of the oldest literary societies in the world. She is now the guardian of the legacy of some of the most fiercely loved writers in all of English literature.
If her age raises eyebrows, Powrie has earned her stripes. She has been a member of the Brontë Society – the membership organisation which owns the parsonage and with it the world’s largest collection of Brontë artefacts – since she was a teenager, having emailed them cold with an offer.
“I said, ‘Oh, hello, I’m Lucy, and I know that you want to reach young people: I’m a young person who loves the Brontës, and I’ve got a lot of young people who love the Brontës. Would you like to work with me?’” She was named a “young ambassador” for the museum and society, becoming a trustee last year.
As she points out, who better than a twentysomething woman to advocate for three sisters who were writing their startlingly original books at a similar age? (Of the three, only Charlotte lived past 30.) “At heart,” says Powrie, “they were young women writing about being a young woman.
Her own love of reading had emerged during unhappy school days in Chippenham, Wiltshire, when she struggled to make friends, which she says was further complicated by her undiagnosed autism.
There was something in the sisters’ bold unconventionality that she had recognised, she says. “I read Wuthering Heights, and it was the darkness in it, I think, that got to the heart of something that I was feeling that I couldn’t articulate. And so [while] Agnes Gray was the way in, as soon as I read Wuthering Heights there was no turning back. It filled my whole life.”
Her parents, while supportive of her enthusiasm, had no literary connections or experience (“I said ‘I’ve just started a blog about books’, and they said, ‘What’s a blog?’”) but, like her heroines, Powrie was a single-minded young woman. By 17, she had an agent for her own writing, at 19 she published her first novel for teens, The Paper and Hearts Society. There are now three in the series; another novel for young adults will be published next year.
“I don’t think I could ever not be writing,” she says. “As Charlotte said, ‘I’m just going to write because I cannot help it.’” She is in her final year of a history degree through the Open University and has 45,000 subscribers on Youtube, where she regularly posts about her reading and writing.
Her teenage fervour for the sisters has mellowed into a thoughtful analysis of how she can help the society and museum stay relevant in a multiplatform age, with so much competition for readers’ attention. That doesn’t mean “[sitting] there constantly going, ‘Look at this thing on TikTok,’” she says, but rather ensuring the society remains valuable and alive to people of all ages. Not a problem, she believes, with these authors.
“They are still so relatable. I think about them every day. There’s not a day goes by when I don’t take a lesson that I’ve learned from the Brontës and put into practice.”
