Emily Brontë’s handwritten poems are highlight of ‘lost library’ auction
An “incredibly rare” handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, with pencil corrections by her sister Charlotte, is going up for auction as part of a “lost library” that has been out of public view for nearly a century.
The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law, who grew up 20 miles from the Brontë family home in Haworth, then acquired some of the family’s heirlooms from Wise, including the manuscript of Emily’s poems, and the family’s much-annotated copy of A History of British Birds, a book immortalised in Jane Eyre.
The Law brothers’ library at Honresfield House disappeared from public view when their nephew and heir Alfred Law died in 1939, and was inaccessible even to academics.
“In the last 90 years, only one or two (very discreet) scholars have had access to slivers of the material, so essentially, only two people alive have seen any of it,” said a spokesperson for Sotheby’s, which is handling the auction of more than 500 manuscripts, first editions and letters from the Honresfield library in July.
Sotheby’s described the manuscript of 29 poems by Emily as “incredibly rare”, valuing it at between £800,000 and £1.2m. “It is the most important manuscript by Emily to come to market in a lifetime, and by far the most significant such manuscript to remain in private hands,” said the auction house. “Almost nothing of Emily’s survived – she essentially wrote Wuthering Heights and then parted the world without a trace. There aren’t even really any letters out there by her, as she had no one to correspond with.”
It is the only surviving handwritten manuscript to feature some of Emily’s most famous poems, including No Coward Soul Is Mine, The Bluebell, and The Old Stoic, and was mentioned by Charlotte in her 1850 preface to Wuthering Heights, when she noted how she “accidentally lighted on a MS volume of verse in my sister Emily’s handwriting.
“I looked it over, and something more than surprise seized me – a deep conviction that these were not common effusions, nor at all like poetry women generally write,” wrote Charlotte. “I thought them condensed and terse, vigorous and genuine. To my ear, they had also a peculiar music – melancholy, and elevating.”
Dr Gabriel Heaton, Sotheby’s English literature and historical manuscripts specialist, said: “With the Brontës, our love of their work is very much bound up with our interest in their lives. These manuscripts bring you a sense of their creativity, very much within the context of their existence, which is just wonderful. I work with literary manuscripts all the time, and Emily Brontë is not someone you ever expect to see because so little of her manuscripts survive. So to have something like this is just electrifying.”
Also in the Honresfield library, which has been cared for by generations of the Law family, is the Brontë family’s copy of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds. Extensive annotations made by their father Rev
Patrick Brontë give an insight into family life in Haworth, from his personal observations – of the golden eagle, he notes that “I saw, in Leeds, a stuffed specimen of this bird; it was considerably larger than a goose, as its neck was as thick as a man’s arm” – to culinary notes. “The use of peacocks for food is not forbidden in the Law of Moses,” he writes, although the starling is “coarse and unpalatable” and “all the Grebes are fishy tasted, and very bad eating and so are all birds, that live on fish”.
The book is mentioned by Charlotte in Jane Eyre, when the young heroine is depicted sinking into a copy, imagining the “death-white realms” of the Arctic, “shadowy, like all the halfcomprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains, but strangely impressive”. The family copy, complete with a pencil sketch by one of the Brontë children, will be auctioned with a guide price of £30,000 to £50,000.
As well as a collection of notes passed between Anne and Emily, including a little sketch of them writing at a table, Sotheby’s will also auction a letter from Charlotte to her publisher George Smith, in which she discusses reviews of Jane Eyre as well as speculation on the identity of the Bells – the pseudonyms used by the sisters.
Brother Branwell’s literary ambitions, meanwhile, are revealed in a letter to Hartley Coleridge, son of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. “Since my childhood, I have been wont to devote the hours I could spare from other and very different employments, to efforts at literary composition,” Branwell writes, adding that while he is about to “enter active life”, he loves writing “too well to fling aside the practise of it without an effort to ascertain whether I could turn it to account, not in wholly maintaining my self but in aiding my maintenance.” His literary ambitions would not be realised.
The lots, which also include manuscripts from Robert Burns and Walter Scott, will be offered across three auctions at Sotheby’s, starting in July, with exhibitions of the literary items planned in London, New York and Edinburgh.
“The collection as a whole paints a unique portrait of the passions of one of the greatest and least-known collecting families from a golden age of book collecting,” said Heaton. “When the library went missing from public view in the 1930s, many assumed it had disappeared, and to now play a role in bringing it to a wider audience is a true career highlight.”