Emily Brontë’s handwritten poems are highlight of ‘lost library’ auction

Collection of rare books and manuscripts first assembled by Charlotte Brontë’s widower has been out of public view for nearly a century

An “incredibly rare” handwritten manuscript of Emily Brontë’s poems, with pencil corrections by her sister Charlotte, is going up for auction as part of a “lost library” that has been out of public view for nearly a century.

The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law, who grew up 20 miles from the Brontë family home in Haworth, then acquired some of the family’s heirlooms from Wise, including the manuscript of Emily’s poems, and the family’s much-annotated copy of A History of British Birds, a book immortalised in Jane Eyre.

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