North Lees Hall is significant to Jane Eyre because Charlotte Bronte visited it in 1845 while staying nearby with her friend Ellen Nussey, and its battlemented facade and three-story manor-house design closely match her description of Thornfield in the novel. The personal blog, miladysboudoir (written by Barbara, who “loves to travel and read,” not a Bronte scholar or an official heritage site) provides three pictures of the North Lees Hall alongside a transcription of Jane’s description of Thornfield in the novel. This location illustrates Gothic convention because Thornfield, like North Lees Hall itself, is an isolated manor house set apart from the surrounding village, battlements, thick walls, and all, exactly the kind of brooding, semi-fortified architecture the Gothic genre relies on to suggest secrets are being kept inside. Mapping North Lees Hall on COVE reveals how the novel's real geography grounds its Gothic atmosphere: Bronte didn't invent the sense of isolation and mystery from nothing, she found it in an actual building and then amplified it in fiction.
Bibliography
Research: https://miladysboudoir.net/2011/10/28/the-literary-connections-of-north-lees-hall/
Image: https://miladysboudoir.net/2011/10/28/the-literary-connections-of-north-lees-hall/