Bookseller offers rarity that inspired Charlotte Brontë – and her pseudonym

Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds, mentioned in Jane Eyre, was owned by Yorkshire philanthropist believed to have supported Brontë family

A rare first edition of Thomas Bewick’s History of British Birds belonging to Frances Currer, the woman believed to have inspired Charlotte Brontë’s pseudonym of Currer Bell, has come to light.

Dubbed “England’s earliest female bibliophile” in Seymour de Ricci’s history of collectors, Frances Mary Richardson Currer’s library in her family home of Eshton Hall, Yorkshire, ran to 15,000 to 20,000 volumes. Among them lay Bewick’s classic of British ornithology - the work Jane Eyre is reading as Charlotte Brontë’s novel opens, and whose “enchanted page[s]” the author also celebrated in poetry.

Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting,” Brontë’s heroine tells her readers in the novel which would go on to be published by the pseudonymous Currer Bell. “With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy: happy at least in my way. I feared nothing but interruption, and that came too soon.”

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