Spread across a huge table in Sotheby’s auction house in London are stacks of immaculately preserved 19th- century first editions and manuscripts, a slew of letters in Jane Austen’s rigorously disciplined script and a small collection of Charlotte Brontë’s hand-sewn books, barely 3in high and filled with writing so teeny it had to be written with a single hair dipped in ink and can only be deciphered under a microscope. (...)
No wonder Ovenden’s hands are shaking and, alongside, Bronte expert Professor Kathryn Sutherland of St Anne’s College, Oxford, is fizzing
with excitement.Because today is the first chance for generations for anyone to get a proper look at it. And it’s all here. (...)
Meanwhile, the first editions — some annotated by their authors — include everything from Jane Austen’s Emma, Persuasion and Pride And Prejudice to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.
But what has really got Ovenden’s heart racing is a set of manuscripts of the Brontë siblings.
The collection includes seven of Charlotte Brontë’s famous ‘little books’ or magazines written at the kitchen table in the Brontë parsonage — alone worth an estimated £5 million — a manuscript collection of poems by sister Anne and a small autographed diary note by Emily and Anne.
The real treasure, however, is a small, slim, red-bound exercise book of Emily Brontë’s poems, annotated by her sister Charlotte and valued at between £800,000 and £1.2 million.
‘This is the Holy Grail,’ says Professor Sutherland. ‘There is another in the British Library and that’s it. This one was for many years considered lost or destroyed. Almost nothing of Emily survived. We can’t believe it’s here.’
Such is the library’s significance that, when it suddenly popped up, largely intact, for sale by Sotheby’s earlier this year, it was hailed as the ‘Tutankhamun’s Tomb of literature’. (...)
But what has really got Ovenden’s heart racing is a set of manuscripts of the Brontë siblings.
The collection includes seven of Charlotte Brontë’s famous ‘little books’ or magazines written at the kitchen table in the Brontë parsonage — alone worth an estimated £5 million — a manuscript collection of poems by sister Anne and a small autographed diary note by Emily and Anne.
The real treasure, however, is a small, slim, red-bound exercise book of Emily Brontë’s poems, annotated by her sister Charlotte and valued at between £800,000 and £1.2 million.
‘This is the Holy Grail,’ says Professor Sutherland. ‘There is another in the British Library and that’s it. This one was for many years considered lost or destroyed. Almost nothing of Emily survived. We can’t believe it’s here.’
Such is the library’s significance that, when it suddenly popped up, largely intact, for sale by Sotheby’s earlier this year, it was hailed as the ‘Tutankhamun’s Tomb of literature’. (Jane Fryer)
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