Book of Charlotte Brontë's teenage poems on sale

The original 1829 'Book of Rhymes' written by Charlotte Brontë using a quill and ink sees the y and h in rhymes transposed

For nearly 200 years, only a select few people had read the contents of a tiny collection of poems written by an author who later became a household name.

Charlotte Brontë was just 13 when she compiled her Book of Rhymes in 1829 - misspelling the word "rhymes".

In 2022, the original volume was purchased for £983,000 at auction and the winning bidder donated it to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, West Yorkshire.

The museum has now teamed up with a publisher to release £20 paperback copies of the anthology, which contains 10 works by the future writer of the novel Jane Eyre.

Ann Dinsdale is the principle curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth

Ann Dinsdale, the museum's principle curator, said: "Charlotte was hugely ambitious.

"She'd grown up seeing poetry published by her father on the parsonage bookshelves.

"So that idea of being a published author had kind of always been present.

"She'd been steeped in the works of Wordsworth and Lord Byron and she saw her true vocation as being in poetry."

The tiny manuscript - measuring just 3.8in x 2.5in (9.7cm x 6.4cm) - was one of six "little books" written by Charlotte but never published.

The eldest of the three Brontë sisters, Charlotte went on to write her classic Jane Eyre 18 years later. The girls grew up in the Haworth parsonage.

She died in 1855 aged 38 and the booklet was kept by her husband Arthur Bell Nicholls until his death.

It was put up for sale in 1915 in London, and again a year later in New York, before disappearing from public view for more than a century before being auctioned for a third time.

The book shows the 10 poems in their original format as well as a transcription of each one

Ms Dinsdale said: "We worked with a publisher called the Tartarus Press, they're based in Leyburn, so it's a very Yorkshire project.

"And we published the edition of the Book of Ryhmes (sic).

"These tiny, early manuscripts are so important in that they chart her development as a writer.

"She's trying to establish her own style, her own voice.

"It was one step in the process that went into her eventually producing Jane Eyre."

The original15-page manuscript, stitched in brown paper covers, is on display in the museum.

It was bought by Friends of the National Libraries (FNL), a UK charity devoted to saving the nation's written and printed heritage.

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