“This material should be kept together. The three sisters were writing much of it around the same table,”

With a wide range of unique Brontë and Jane Austen material on the auction block, campaigners are calling for a blanket export bar on items from the library leaving the UK, with institutions including the Bodleian Library exploring how to safeguard the collection.

“This material should be kept together. The three sisters were writing much of it around the same table,” Dinsdale said. She said that for institutions strapped for cash after the Coronavirus epidemic “July doesn’t give us much time at all”.

The UK Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport would not comment ahead of the sale.(...)

In a measure of the library’s worth, Sotheby’s recently offered one of the jewels in the collection, seven miniature books handwritten by Charlotte Brontë between the ages of 13 and 22, covering 174 pages, to the Brontë Parsonage Museum in a private sale for £4.5 million, which would keep it out of the auctions.

In November 2019 the Parsonage ran a major fundraising campaign to buy a single miniature work, called the The Young Men’s Magazine, at a Paris auction for €600,000. Dinsdale said the Parsonage was not ruling out an attempt to buy the books, but “all our energy is focussed on trying to keep the collection as a whole together. We have always tried not to be involved in inflating the prices of Brontë material.“ (Tim Cornwell) thetimes/fight-to-keep-early-burns-book-out-of-private-hands