Charlotte Brontë's letter to Ellen Nussey

The Charlotte Brontë letter to Ellen Nussey auctioned at Sotheby's last July has finally reached its final destination: the Brontë Parsonage Museum. The Telegraph & Argus carries the story:

Ann Dinsdale, collections manager at the museum in Church Street, said the fact Charlotte wrote so many letters to Ellen, and that Ellen kept them, was the reason historians knew so much about the domestic life of the famous literary sisters.
The letter, dated June 19, 1834, was written at the beginning of the two women’s friendship. In it, Charlotte talks about Ellen’s recent trip to London.
Miss Dinsdale said: “Ellen was from a more affluent background than the Brontës and she had been on a visit to London. Charlotte had never been to London and all her ideas about it were from literature. She considered it to be a wicked place and she was amazed that Ellen had returned the same person.
“The letter shows the contrast between their lives. Charlotte would have loved to travel but because the Brontës were relatively poor it wasn’t really an option.” (Kathryn Bradley)

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Property removed from Dunecht House, Aberdeenshire
Charlotte Brontë Autograph Letter Signed, to Ellen Nussey

Estimate 15,000-20,000 GBP
17500 GBP SOLD to the Brontë Society.

"...I know my own sentiments because I can read my own mind, but the mind of the rest of man and woman-kind, are to me sealed volumes, hieroglyphicked scrolls which I cannot easily either unseal or decipher; yet time, careful study, long acquaintance overcome most difficulties, and in your case, I think they have succeeded well in bringing to light and Construing that hidden language whose turnings, windings, inconsistencies, and obscurities, so frequently baffle the researches of the honest observer of human Nature..."

A remarkable, intense letter by the young Charlotte Brontë to one of her closest friends. The two young women had met in 1831 when both were students at Margaret Wooler's school near Dewsbury (some 15 miles from Haworth). By the time of this letter she was 18 and back living at the parsonage with her siblings, the four of them together deeply immersed in writing about their imaginary kingdoms of Gondal and Angria. Her letters to Ellen through the early months of 1834 show the deep impression made on her by her friend's first trip to London. This letter reveals the extraordinary contrast between Brontë's wide-ranging and free imagination - her talk of "hieroglyphicked scrolls" and observations of human nature - and the constraints of her domestic life, which made London an almost-unimaginably distant place of fascination and sin.
A partially unpublished letter. Although included in ed. Smith, Letters of Charlotte Brontë Vol I, 1829-1847 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), where it is cited as an untraced manuscript, the published text has elisions and includes a number of textual anomalies which the original manuscript can correct.

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