LONDON – A manuscript by British author Charlotte Brontë that fits comfortably into the palm of a hand fetched £691,000 pounds (€823,000) at a Sotheby’s auction yesterday, more than twice the upper estimate.
The tiny booklet by the author of the 19th classic Jane Eyre contains more than 4,000 words in miniature letters on 19 pages, which measure less than 1.5 by 2.5 inches.
Brontë wrote the manuscript when she was 14 and living with her family at Haworth in Yorkshire, and it was one of six hand-written Young Men's Magazinesshe created at that time.
It is set in the fantasy world of "Glass Town", the earliest of the fictional worlds created by the four Brontë siblings that included Charlotte's younger sister Emily, who wrote Wuthering Heights.
Sotheby’s, which auctioned the mini-magazine as part of its English literature sale in London, called it “the most important Brontë manuscript to have appeared at public auction in more than 30 years”. It is one of only a handful of such manuscripts remaining in private hands.
– (Reuters)