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“A Book of Rhymes” by Charlotte Brontë.
Timothy A. Clary/AFP via Getty Images
More than a century after disappearing from a private collection, a tiny manuscript written by 13-year-old Charlotte Bront will be returned to the public in the house where she wrote it.
The Friends of National Libraries, a British charity, announced on Monday that they had purchased the 15-page book, which contains 10 poems that have never been published.
The group said it would donate the manuscript to the Bront Parsonage Museum in the former home of the Bront family.
News late last month that the manuscript would be offered for sale caught the attention of Bront fans. The existence of the manuscript, titled A Book of Rhymes, was well known to Bront’s students and her sisters, but its whereabouts were unknown.
Friday, Barronsreported that the manuscript sold for an asking price of $1.25 million. The manuscript sold Thursday shortly after the opening bell of the New York antiquarian book fair, according to Henry Wessells of James Cummins Bookseller, who offered the book for sale on behalf of a private owner, who has not been identified.
The manuscript is one of 17 small books made by Charlotte Bront as a child that will eventually go on display at the Bront Parsonage Museum in the village of Haworth, West Yorkshire. It is the last of the small books known to have been in private hands.
It’s always touching when an item belonging to the Bront family is brought home and that last little book returning to where it was written when it was thought lost is very special to us, said Ann Dinnsdale, the museum’s senior curator, in a statement. Museum visitors love to see these little books and we know how inspiring they are to many.
The manuscript will also be digitized, making the poems available to the public for the first time since they were written.
The manuscript is dated 1829, when Bront was 13 years old. His best-known novel, Jane Eyre, was published in 1847. Bront and his siblings, sisters Anne and Emily, and brother Branwell, were prolific writers; the worlds they created as children have fascinated scholars, though parts of the writings have been lost.
If you could see how small it is, you’d wonder if it survived, Wessells, the bookseller, said of the manuscript on Friday. When I first saw it and held it in my hands, it was as if it could easily have been thrown in the trash anytime in the past hundred years, and it survived.
Wessells would not disclose the identity of the previous owner, but said the manuscript had been in America since 1916, when it was last seen at auction.
Saving Charlotte Bront’s little book is a giant win for Britain, Geordie Greig, chairman of the Friends of National Libraries, said in a statement. Returning this literary treasure to the Bronte Parsonage where it was written is important for scholars and also for students studying one of our greatest women writers.
The charity raised the funds to buy the book in two weeks. The booksellers granted the organization a period of exclusivity to raise the funds. Donors to the effort include the TS Eliot estate.
Write to Josh Nathan-Kazis at [email protected]
