Amy Lowell's Brontë manuscripts

An exhibition in Harvard with Brontë items on display:

In the picture: Conservator for Harvard University Library Collections Priscilla Anderson working on Brontë juvenilia.

September 4, 2012 - January 12, 2013
From Austen to Zola: Amy Lowell as a Collector

Amy Lowell - a controversial, cigar-smoking, outspoken, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet - collected works by prominent creative artists such as Jane Austen, Ludwig von Beethoven, William Blake, Charlotte Brontë, John Keats, Michaelangelo, Walt Whitman and Émile Zola. A selection from the thousands of rare books and manuscripts collected by Lowell, and bequeathed to Harvard in 1925, are showcased in this exhibition.

Lowell was one of the few women competing in the male-dominated world of collecting. She began at age 17 by purchasing Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels with her Christmas money. The exhibition includes several works by William Blake, another of her early collecting interests, including Songs of Innocence (1789); a sketch by Michelangelo on the back of a work order (1523); letters by Voltaire, Jane Austen, and Harriet Beecher Stowe; love letters from Lord Nelson to Lady Hamilton, and John Keats to Fanny Brawne; manuscripts by Ben Jonson, Jean La Fontaine, Charlotte Brontë, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson; books owned by Charles I and the Empress Josephine; and much, much more.

These often-astonishing individual books and manuscripts, and the tale of how Lowell found and acquired them, and why, tell a fascinating story of the world of collecting at the turn of the twentieth century, illuminating how collections are formed, and how such a gift can impact an institution’s collecting.

Edison and Newman Room, Houghton Library

The January-February issue of Harvard Magazine gave more information about the Harvard Brontë collection:

In 1821, Charlotte’s mother died, leaving widower Patrick, a curate in rural West Yorkshire, to care for their six children. The two oldest died four years later of tuberculosis (which would eventually take them all before Patrick himself died). The four surviving children created what their father called “a little society among themselves.” Charlotte, age 10, and Branwell, 9, began a series of plays based on the adventures of their toy soldiers, set in their make-believe world of Glass Town and Angria in Africa. The youngest sisters, Emily and Anne, would follow along with stories, and the self-described “scribblemaniacs” kept at it into early adulthood.

About 20 of these texts took the form of handsewn miniature books two inches tall. Harvard’s Houghton Library has nine of them, given by the poet Amy Lowell. The fragile volumes have just been treated to a painstaking team effort at the library to preserve and protect them. Harvard staffer Melissa Banta has chronicled that initiative in an article for the Harvard Library Bulletin, scheduled for publication this coming fall. (Christopher Reed)

The complete Lowell 1925 donation can be consulted here. According to her notes:

 the manuscripts were given to her by Thomas J. Wise in London on 1905 Sept. 11. She also notes that "Mr. Wise bought everything that the Rev. Arthur Bell Nichols (Charlotte Brontë's husband) had relating to his wife and his wife's family.

But this is not all. The Harvard Gazette informs:

From October through January, a companion exhibition, “Six Decades of Treasure Hunting: Purchases with the Amy Lowell Fund,” will be in the Amy Lowell Room at Houghton, focusing on the important library acquisitions made possible by the funds bequeathed by Lowell to further develop the Harvard collections.

As far as we know, the Brontë items acquired through the Fund are:

Five letters from Charlotte Brontë to William Smith Williams and one from Charlotte to Patrick Brontë  (Ms Eng 871) (purchased in 1953)