Two rare Bront first editions have sold at auction for more than twice the expected price.

Anne Bront's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall fetched a staggering £10,755 when it went under the hammer at Sotheby's.

Before last Thursday's auction, experts estimated it would sell for around £5,000.

And there was further surprise when a first edition copy of Charlotte Bront's Jane Eyre - expected to fetch up to £3,000 - reached £7,170.

Rachel Terry, curator of the Bront Parsonage Museum at Haworth, said the prices were particularly high.

"But the market is buoyant at the moment because of the poor state of stocks and shares and people are looking at collections like these as investments," she added.

The lots were among 250 from the collection of Shell group magnate Neville Fakes.

The Bront Society did not bid for the editions because the museum already had first edition volumes of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and the Jane Eyre volumes on offer were not in their original bindings.

Original Bront novels came in sets of three editions. Jane Eyre was published in 1847.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was published in 1848, its author Anne Bront dying a year later before reaching her 30th birthday.