Beginning next month, notes BBC News, literary lovers will be able to see items from the private collection at exhibitions in London, Edinburgh and New York.

 “In the last 90 years, only one or two (very discreet) scholars have had access to slivers of the material, so essentially, only two people alive have seen any of it,” a Sotheby’s spokesperson tells the Guardian’s Alison Flood.

Beginning next month, notes BBC News, literary lovers will be able to see items from the private collection at exhibitions in London, Edinburgh and New York. Where the trove will end up after the auction remains to be seen, but as the Brontë Society notes in a statement, it “believes that the rightful home for these unique and extraordinary manuscripts, unseen for a hundred years, is at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where they can be enjoyed by visitors, explored by scholars and shared with Brontë enthusiasts around the world for generations to come.”

Given the financial challenges posed by Covid-19, however, the society acknowledges that it is “faced with the very real possibility that this immensely significant collection will be dispersed and disappear into private collections across the globe.”

smithsonian