Bronte manuscript sells for 780,000 euros at Paris auction

Written when the author was 14, the book will now be retutned to a musuem in her hometown of Haworth, West Yorkshire.

A curator at the Musee des Lettres et Manuscrits (Letters and Manuscripts Museum) displays the miniature manuscript dated 1830 written by Charlotte Bronte at the museum in Paris Jan. 30, 201
After a successful auction France a miniature work by novelist and poet Charlotte Bronte will be returned to a British museum [File:Charles Platiau/Reuters]

A miniature book written by Charlotte Bronte while a teenager was bought at auction in Paris on Monday for 780,000 euros ($862,446.00) by a museum in the United Kingdom whose bid was boosted by an appeal from British actress Judi Dench.

Bronte wrote the unpublished manuscript, which is no larger than a matchbox, in 1830 at the age of 14. It was bought by the Bronte Parsonage Museum which is based at Bronte’s childhood home in Haworth, West Yorkshire.

Dench, the doyenne of British theatre and film and honorary president of the Bronte Society, had urged the public to help bring the “little book home to Haworth” by donating money.

The manuscript, filled with over 4,000 tiny written words on paper stitched into a brown paper cover, had only come up for auction once before, eight years ago. On that occasion, it slipped through the museum’s grasp and into a private collection.

“It has rarely been seen since,” the Bronte Parsonage Museum wrote on its Crowdfunder page in advance of the sale.

The manuscript is made up of stories with characters from “Glass Town”, an imaginary world invented by Bronte and her sisters Emily and Anne.

The museum raised 84,892 pounds in public donations, exceeding the target it had set. That supplemented a fund it already raised from other sources to bid for the manuscript, which is one in a sequence of six little books written by Bronte.

Five are known to survive, of which all the others are already held by the museum.

Source: Reuters