Last modified on Tue 25 May 2021 08.37 EDT
An âincredibly rareâ handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontëâs poems, with pencil corrections by her sister Charlotte, is going up for auction as part of a âlost libraryâ 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 familyâs heirlooms from Wise, including the manuscript of Emilyâs poems, and the familyâs much-annotated copy of A History of British Birds, a book immortalised in Jane Eyre.