Rare Brontë letters head back home after £185,000 auction sale

A RARE collection of letters written by Charlotte Brontë is to return to the writer’s home in Haworth – the Brontë Parsonage Museum – after they were bought at auction for £185,000.

The letters, which went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in London yesterday, were previously in a private collection.

The Brontë Society was able to buy the letters thanks to support of £198,450 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), the UK’s ‘fund of last resort’ for saving the nation’s most important heritage at risk.

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Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at Brontë Parsonage Museum, said: “These are amongst the most significant Brontë letters to come to light in decades. They belong in Haworth and we are delighted that both scholars and members of the public will now have the opportunity to study and enjoy them, either here at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, or through our online resources.”

The collection consists of six letters written by Charlotte Brontë to Ellen Nussey, her closest friend.

Their lifelong friendship began in 1831 when they both became pupils at Miss Wooler’s school at Roe Head, near Mirfield, West Yorkshire. After leaving school in 1832, the two friends wrote to each other regularly and it is thanks to Ellen that Charlotte’s letters, upon which so much of Brontë scholarship is based, have survived.

These letters were amongst approximately 350 which Ellen loaned to Elizabeth Gaskell during her research for The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), and which Gaskell considered to be important enough to quote from in the biography.

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The letters have been incorporated in a first edition copy of Gaskell’s two-volume biography. Together, the letters chart the friendship between the two women, the first having been written on October 18 1832, shortly after their schooldays ended, and the final one, written to Ellen’s sister on December 28 1854, shortly before Charlotte’s death in the following March.

Scholars have not had access to the original letters and have been forced to base their texts on inaccurate transcripts.

In every case, the letters do not correspond exactly with the published versions. Corrections can now be made to previously published versions.