Video: There’s a stuffed giraffe in the Bronte museum

And visitors to the Brontë Parsonage Museum will now be able to re-examine the heritage and history of the sisters’ works, thanks to a new surrealist exhibition.

According to those behind Capturing the Brontës, the exhibition will examine unusual facts and mysteries surrounding the family.

Included amongst the exhibition is a stuffed giraffe which “neatly contrasts with the melancholic reference to Charlotte Brontë’s connection with her publisher George Smith”.

Elsewhere the writers’ biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell, is cast as a cockatoo, and Keeper, Emily Brontë’s enormous faithful dog, is resurrected as Yorkshire’s answer to Greyfriar’s Bobby.

The exhibition will run simultaneously at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth and at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, before travelling to London in February.

Charlotte Cory, the artist behind it, said all of the locations were of importance to the Brontë family. “Haworth was home. Harrogate is nearby. It was also the place where you went to take the foul-smelling healthy waters...London, meanwhile, always represented somewhere enticing and alluringly unattainable to the Brontë family.”

She added that Capturing the Brontës was her “endeavour to encapsulate something of the animal spirit of the Brontës”. It will form part of a wider schedule of events for visitors to the museum throughout the exhibition.

Professor Ann Sumner, executive director of the Brontë Society, said “We are delighted to be working with Charlotte on this influential and original show. The Parsonage will be transformed this autumn and in the lead- up to Christmas. Her work is genuinely thought-provoking and we know that our visitors will be fascinated.”

The exhibition begins today and runs till the end of the year.