As children, the Brönte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne, wrote stories that later starred their brother Branwell’s soldier dolls. Own Branwell I also wrote them. If you visit the house in which they grew up – an isolated parsonage in the middle of Nowhere, Yorkshire, known today as Brontë Parsonage Museum– you can imagine them folding the pages into little books, books as small as playing cards. Because everything in that house continues as they left it, only in a messy time, because everything happens at the same time now that it has already happened. There are half-written letters here, a cup of tea there, a newspaper that perhaps the Reverend -and lonely father- Patrick Bronte– he read absently one morning. There are inkwells, a sofa that is the sofa Emily died on, and, for just a week, a tiny original that is the most expensive tiny original in history.
The house of a writer or, in this case, of a family of writers, can work, if it is protected and cared for as the Brönte house is protected and cared for, like a huge puzzle that never stops being completed. , a physical memory, the place where time has ceased to exist because everything, anything, is about to start again. The return home of Charlotte Brönte’s diminutive original, a collection of poems simply titled ‘A Book of Rhymes’, written and made by herself in 1829, that is, when he was 13 years old, points in that direction. Missing since 1916, in fact, in private hands ever since, the original was the only one of nearly twenty such copies known to have been written and made by Charlotte for amusement, still far from home. The last time she had seen him, she had seen him in New York. It was paid for just $520 at auction.
When it became known that the lost original, a 10 by 6 centimeter miniature, was to be the star of the New York Antique Book Fair this year – which took place between 21 and 24 April – the UK’s literary treasure hunting charity, something called The Friends of the National Libraries (FNL), They put the workers to work. The objective? Raise enough money in record time to beat every last bid and win ‘A Book of Rhymes’ to take her place among the rest of Charlotte’s own mini-books at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Because that’s what he’s been devoting himself to FNL since it was founded in 1931: rescuing UK literary treasures. To take care, in short, of that memory with the aspect of a puzzle in progress that is also the literary history of a place. Did you get the original from Brönte? He did, yes. How much did he pay for it? $1.25 million.
Such an amount is the largest that has ever been paid for a manuscript so minuscule, and so ironically and courageously adolescent. What you read on the first page is the title, in block letters drawn by Charlotte herself –there is even an error in her name, not enough space is left to include the letter a–, and the apostille: ‘Sold by Nobody and Printed by Herself’, that is, Sold by Nobody, and printed by herself. Contains 10 poems, obviously unpublished. In fact, they had not even been taken into account as part of Charlotte’s work, despite the fact that, as Ann Dinsdale, one of those responsible for the Brönte house-museum, recalls, “we know that if Charlotte wanted something when she started to write was to be a poet. “She sent verses at the time of it to a renowned poet of the time, and told him that she was very serious,” says Dinsdale. But he, a today infinitely less remembered Robert SoutheyHe didn’t take it seriously at all.
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“He told her that literature wasn’t for women, and that it shouldn’t be,” Dinsdale recalled in an interview not too long ago, mentioning the response that this Southey had given him. Southey died four years before ‘Jane Eyre’ was published., in 1847, and was unable to swallow his words. The novel, the pinnacle of universal literature, collected, in the words of the time collected by the essayist Stevie Davies, the revolutionary spirit of the moment. In 1855, ‘Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine’ related the European revolutions –against the industrialization that led the worker to poverty and mere automaton status– with Jane Eyre as an expression of the forces of social anarchy. Referring to France’s loss of the throne, he asserted: “This is your true revolution: France is only one of the Western powers, but women make up half the world.”
Charlotte wasn’t talking about anyone but herself when she wrote ‘Jane Eyre‘ and yet she was able to capture, from her supposed isolation in Haworth, the injustice of the moment because she suffered from it too. And because she, looking inside, she did nothing but look outside. The curious thing about the poems found is that they don’t talk about what surrounded her then, but about everything she hoped to see one day. Of the world out there. In fact, the germ of the novel itself is in them and in the stories that she wrote with her sisters when they were children. The stories of the Branwell soldier dolls. Where the imaginary kingdom of Angria and the Confederation of the City of Glass were born. An indispensable part of the memory that she preserves is the house where she saw them grow up, the place where everything is about to start over forever.