A rediscovered letter by Charlotte Brontë

It seems that the attics have been checked lately because new Brontë-related material is appearing. Besides the controversial Carus-Wilson letters, we read on the Yorkshire Post today how a new letter by Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams written in 1850 has resurfaced and it's being auctioned by Toovey's next July 18:

A REVEALING and previously unpublished letter by Charlotte Brontë, author of Jane Eyre, is expected to fetch up to £15,000 at auction after surfacing among a pile of papers in an attic.

The 1850 missive to William Smith Williams, her publisher's reader, contains forthright views on literary and society figures of the day and her love of the Lake District.Brontë writes that during a recent visit to the Lakes, she met her future biographer, Elizabeth Gaskell: "I like her very much; her manner is kind, candid and unassuming, and her conversation peculiarly interesting."
And in the four-page letter she describes married writer George Henry Lewes, who later eloped with Mary Ann Evans, better known as author George Eliot, as a "rather naughty little man."
She also toured the Lake District, saying: "If I could only have dropped unseen out of the carriage and gone away by myself in amongst those grand hills and sweet dales, I should have drank in its full power."
The letter was penned three years after Jane Eyre's publication and four years before she married her father's curate, Arthur Bell Nicholls – she died in pregnancy a year later.
It was found at the bottom of a pile of inherited papers in the attic of a modest house in a village on the Sussex-Surrey border.
It is being auctioned by Toovey's, of Washington, West Sussex, on July 18.
A spokeswoman from Brontë Parsonage Museum said: "There are other letters published from Charlotte to William Smith Williams, who had become a friend, and this fits in well with that record."

Categories: In_the_News, Brontëana, Charlotte_Brontë