A copy of the long forgotten The Remains of Henry Kirke White by Robert Southey was recently bought for £200,000, including £170,000 from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. Reason being that the book, a mixture of poems, letters and biography, once belonged to Maria Brontë, and contains assorted sketches, annotations and notes by members of the Brontë family, including prose and a poem composed by Charlotte when she was a teenager. The book has been in the USA for most of the last hundred years, but will now return to Haworth, Yorkshire, where it will go on display at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the former Brontë family home.
Aside from belonging to arguably the world’s most famous literary family, the copy of White’s novel survived a shipwreck prior to Maria’s 1812 marriage to Patrick Brontë. Patrick inscribed the volume in Latin, ‘...the book of my dearest wife and it was saved from the waves. So then it will always be preserved’.