Tiny Brontë book heads home to Yorkshire after New York sale

A miniature book of poems written by a 13-year-old Charlotte Brontë will return to her windswept Yorkshire home after it was bought for $1.25 million (about R19 million) by a British consortium, the buyers said this week.

Smaller than a playing card, the 15-page manuscript dated 1829 is a collection of 10 unpublished poems that was unveiled in New York last week after more than a century hidden away.

Titled “A Book of Ryhmes (sic) by Charlotte Brontë, Sold by Nobody, and Printed by Herself”, the volume is hand-stitched in its original brown paper covers.

Friends of the National Libraries, a British literary charity, confirmed it had raised the $1.25 million, meaning that “inch for inch, (it) is possibly the most valuable literary manuscript ever to be sold”.

It will be donated to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, Yorkshire, where the Jane Eyre novelist grew up with her siblings including young sisters Emily and Anne.

Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s chief curator, thanked all the British benefactors who came together to fund the purchase after the charity was offered first refusal by the sellers in New York.

“This final little book coming back to the place it was written, when it had been thought lost, is very special for us,” she said.

The book had not been seen in public since November 1916, when it sold at auction in New York for $520. It was the last of more than two dozen miniature works created by Brontë known to remain in private hands.

Along with their brother Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne entertained themselves by weaving intricate stories set in a sophisticated imaginary world.

The sisters went on to write some of the best-loved novels in English literature, including Emily’s Wuthering Heights and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

Henry Wessells of New Yorkbased James Cummins Bookseller said last week the private owner had found the manuscript “in an envelope tucked into a book”.

“It’s wonderful to look at it inside and soon the world will be able to see it,” Wessells said.

In December, the same charity acting for UK libraries purchased a collection of books and manuscripts, including seven of Charlotte’s miniatures, for £15 million.