Students of the Brontë sisters will be especially cheered by the news. The collection was due to go to auction in July at Sotheby’s, but the auction house agreed to halt the sale in order to provide FNL with the time to raise and secure the funds needed to keep the collection in Britain. Jane Austen’s House in Chawton, Hampshire, and the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth also contributed.įNL also gained individual donations from thousands of people across the world, who cumulatively raised just under £150,000. Eliot and the Foyle foundations, with £2.5m coming from museums and libraries including the Bodleian, the British Library and the National Library of Scotland. The other half of the funds raised came from a consortium of literary organisations, including the T.S. His £7.5m contribution to the FNL campaign is the largest ever given by an individual in Britain for literary manuscripts.
"This literary cornucopia will now belong permanently to the public domain in the UK," FNL said in a statement.īlavatnik has long been a patron of the arts in the UK, and is best known for his funding of Tate Modern’s Blavatnik Building.
It was acquired by Friends of the National Libraries (FNL) for £15m after Leonard Blavatnik, the 64-year-old businessman known as the richest man in Britain, matched the £7.5m sum raised by the charity. The Honresfield Library, a 19th century private library created by the Rochdale mill owner William Law, has been in private ownership for more than a century. Schoolchildren and members of the public will now be able to read priceless literary artefacts like a letter written by Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra in January 1796, in which she mediates on the end of a love affair, a letter she wrote on the eve of a ball.Īlso on view will be the poems Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë wrote throughout their twenties from their home in Haworth, Yorkshire, and which were for a time believed lost, and have yet to be properly examined. The “unprecedented” acquisition of the Honresfield Library ensures the texts will remain in Britain, and for public use, rather than being sold to private collectors around the world. Though the origins of the manuscripts are mysterious-we don't know the authors or the scribes-their staying power is a triumph that continues to enrich our understanding of history.Īnglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, World, War is on view at the British Library in London until February 19, 2019.įour of the only surviving Old English manuscripts are on display at the British Library.Original manuscripts by the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, Robert Burns and Walter Scott have been acquired by a huge consortium of British literary organisations, and will now be donated to libraries and writers’ houses across the UK. In an age where information is available at our fingertips, the meticulous work of each scribe is all the more impressive.Īs historical artifacts, art objects, and important pieces of literature, the four codices are a unique window into Anglo-Saxon life. All likely produced in the 10th century, they are an incredible reminder of how precious the written word can be. The survivors are the Vercelli Book, which contains a wealth of Old English poetry the Beowulf Manuscript, the epic story of its titular hero the Junius Manuscript, comprised of four long-form religious poems and the Exeter Book, a 131-page manuscript filled with narrative poems, riddles, and elegies. All four are on display at the British Library as part of its Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, Warexhibition. These four books of poetry, handwritten in the beautiful script we associate with Old English, are artistic jewels unto themselves, each displaying a different aspect of Medieval Anglo-Saxon society.
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