2024-04-16
The Friends of the National Libraries with the help of the United Kingdom richest man has raised over $20 million to purchase a collection of manuscripts including works by Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Walter Scott. The Honresfield Library will be acquired for the British Nation from auction house Sotheby's.
The library with historic manuscripts and books was created by two Victorian industrialists, Alfred and William Law, at the turn of the 20th century. They lived less than 30 kilometres from the Brontë family residence at Haworth. Until 1939, when the library was managed by an heir - the Law brothers' nephew - only scholars had access to the works. Subsequent heirs prevented anyone from seeing the collection at all. In May 2021, Sotheby's announced its auction plans, which on the one hand provoked jubilant reactions in academia, but on the other caused concern about the possibility of splitting the collection. At this point, the Friends of the National Libraries entered the story, persuading the auction house to postpone the first tranche of the sale planned for July 2021. They planned to raise the entire anticipated sum and buy back the collection on behalf of selected UK libraries. The plan succeeded less than 5 months after the agreement, at the end of December 2021.
The entire collection comprises over 500 historical manuscripts and 1400 printed books. Some of the library's most valuable manuscripts include the 1844 manuscript of Emily Brontë's poems with Charlotte's notes written in pencil (estimate price ranged from $1.1 million to $1.7 million) and the 1817 manuscript of Walter Scott's novel Rob Roy. First editions of Anne Brontë's novel 'Agnes Grey' and Emily Brontë's 'Wuthering Heights' (Sotheby's estimate amounts for the pair ranged from $280,000 to $425,000) are also included. Two letters from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra may be considered unique. One letter from 1796, in which Austen, then only 20 years old, discusses her love affair. It is the earliest surviving handwritten letter by the more famous of the sisters.
In addition to the Friends of the National Libraries, a consortium of 8 institutions took part in the collection: the British Library, the National Library of Scotland, the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds and museums dedicated to the memory of Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Robert Burns and the Brontë family. The National Heritage Memorial Fund, which is co-funded by the UK government, has contributed £4 million, while Britain's richest man, Sir Leonard Valentinovich Blavatnik, has donated £7.5 million. It is in honour of the most generous donor that the collection will be renamed - the Honresfield-Blavatnik Library.