When the writer Branwell Brontë moved to Broughton-in-Furness for work as a tutor in 1840 it offered little intrigue to provide plots for the novels of his more famous literary sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne.
He wrote to a friend: “I am fixed in a little retired town by the sea-shore, among woody hills that rise round me.”
Little has changed in the pretty Cumbrian town on the edge of the Lake District, which is recorded in the Domesday Book with a church dating back to the Saxon era. Even now it has a population of less than 600.
However, generations of pastoral calm have been ripped apart by the fallout from a poison pen campaign against its present literary giant, one of Britain’s bestselling
