A letter hidden away for 160 years in a private collection has returned home to the place where it was written.
It is back at the Bronte Parsonage Museum, after a journey of 4,000 miles, where it was penned by Charlotte Bronte to her publisher, William Smith Williams.
The Bronte Society are understood to have paid about £25,000 for the letter with the help of a £12,000 grant from the Government’s Museums Archives and Libraries office and the V&A purchase fund.
It goes on display at the museum in Haworth for the first time this weekend and will remain on show until the end of the year.
The letter was written at the Parsonage on January 13, 1848, three months after the publication of Jane Eyre.
Charlotte signed the letter C. Bell – Currer Bell – the pseudonym she used for her early publications.
It left the country more than 70 years ago when it was bought by an American Bronte Society member during a visit to England.
It was inherited by Patti Engels, of California, who contacted Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s collection manager, offering to sell it.
Mrs Dinsdale said: “She was keen that it should come back to Haworth and not be sold in America. We were very excited and the Bronte Society decided we should have it.
“It has now come back home to the place where it was written all those years ago. Her letters to Mr Williams are interesting. In this she has written just after Jane Eyre was published and he has sent her some reviews on which she comments.”
Charlotte writes: “You have just culled the best sentences in each review, as if you have been gathering flowers in a parterre, rejecting which is superfluous and unsightly like weeds…….”
Mrs Dinsdale said: “Charlotte wrote a lot to Williams. He was the first person to spot her potential as a novelist. After the loss of her sisters, she came to rely on his letters.”
It will now join the 100 other letters in the Bronte collection written by Charlotte.
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