According to the Daily Mail, the T.S. Elliot estate has stepped in (not the first time it comes to Brontës help) in the fight to keep the Honresfeld collection together: One tweet from Stephen Fry boosted the appeal last month to save a secret £15million treasure trove of literary masterpieces, which are at risk of being split up and sold after staying hidden for a century. Following Fry’s intervention, I can reveal that T.S. Eliot’s trustees, 56 years after his death, have donated £50,000 to help save the manuscripts of Charlotte Brontë, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns for the nation. (Richard Eden and Juliet Conway)
Stephen Fry himself published this a few days ago in the Air Mail:
But what most catches the eyes is the extraordinary trove of Brontëana. There are seven exquisitely produced miniature books written, illustrated, and bound by the teenage Charlotte, chronicling adventures in her imagined world of Glass Town. We have always known that, after Emily’s death, Charlotte found a notebook of her younger sister’s poetry, but it has been assumed that the verses themselves were irretrievably lost. Yet now here that notebook is, filled with 31 Emily Brontë poems in her own hand for academics and enthusiasts to pore and purr over. (...)
Yet hold awhile. Jane Austen continues to grow as (please don’t hit me) a global brand. The Brontës inspire more and more generations around the world. Scott has always been venerated on the Continent, and especially in this year of the 250th anniversary of his birth his reputation is resurgent in his homeland, the Scotland whose identity he more or less invented. To the Scots, Rabbie Burns is more than a national bard; he is a personal friend. (...)
Sotheby’s has agreed to hold off the sale until November, allowing a new-forged and unprecedented consortium of British libraries (Oxford’s Bodleian; the British Library; the Brotherton, in Leeds; the National Library of Scotland; inter alia) time to raise the needful, a gulp-inducing $21 million. Their plan is to keep the collection whole in name and substance, but collaborating and sharing elements with their most natural homes. To Abbotsford, the vast mansion Sir Walter built that now serves as the Scott museum; to Jane Austen’s House, in Hampshire; to the Haworth Brontë Parsonage Museum; to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, in Alloway. Public access remains the key. The palpable physicality of the handwritten is especially to be prized in our Digital Age. You can almost hear the scratch of pens racing across the paper in these astonishing diaries, letters, and notebooks. (..)
Reader, as Charlotte B. liked to apostrophize, perhaps you can help?
Let us pray!
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