Lucy Powrie was 15 when she read Agnes Grey. Ten years on she is chair of the Brontë Parsonage Museum. 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.”.
![[Esther Addley]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2023/06/05/Esther_Addley.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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.”.
![[Exterior of the Brontë Parsonage Museum]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/1cec66d2a80f9af5d10d6b1ce0070d5fd0034f66/0_0_4368_2621/master/4368.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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.
![[Lucy Powrie sitting on a bed with an open book]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6844c1ee9149b9a76b241872c00b3de5099774ee/0_1376_5504_6880/master/5504.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
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.
