For anyone who has ever dreamed of windswept moors, the Villa Charlotte Brontë is an improbable revelation. As a longtime Brontë devotee raised only ten minutes from its gates, I was astonished to discover just last year that it existed, and promptly resolved to make the pilgrimage. I arrived on a blustery and emotionally fraught afternoon, a perfectly Eyrean alignment of weather and mood. The Villa felt like something one discovers only in a dream or in a Gothic novel, like it had no business hiding on a street corner in The Bronx, though its precise neighborhood—Spuyten Duyvil, or “spouting devil,” an old Dutch reference to the Hudson River’s tidal currents—carries its own vaguely Gothic flavor. The Villa is, I should note, private property. I trespassed lightly that day, slipping past the warning signs and down the main stairwell, which bisects the twin buildings of the apartment complex like a spine. I stumbled into a garden thick with green and stole a glimpse of the Hudson below before retreating upward, pulse quickening.
The New York Times once breathlessly de…
