The parsonage at Haworth, hone to the Brontë family

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They were discovered inside a book once belonging to the Bronte's mother Maria that was sold to an America-based collector in the 1860s. The book and documents were purchased by the Bronte Society for a fee thought to be in excess of £170,000 in 2016. Bronte scholars have now taken transcripts and images of the pages and published them within a new release called Charlotte Bronte: The Lost Manuscripts. The pieces date to 1833 when Charlotte was 17-years-old and are set in the fictional world of Angria, where she and her brother Branwell would later base a series of books.

Manuscripts penned by Charlotte Bronte that remained unseen for 200 years have been published

The short story is about a mysterious character who arrives in Bronte's home village Haworth and plies the 'riff-raff' with alcohol. They run riot and end up dragging a local minister from his bed and flogging him. The comparatively meek poem is about the lovesick wife of a king and is more traditional in tone. Some of the pages within the Robert Southey book, The Remains of Henry Kirke White, owned by Charlotte's mum Maria where the previously unseen material was discovered, show annotations and sketches scrawled by the young Bronte girls. Following Maria's death in 1821 that book was passed on to her family and eventually sold to America after the death of Charlotte's father Patrick in 1861. It is thought to have passed through the hands of a number of private collectors before being acquired by the Bronte Society in 2016.

The manuscript has been hidden for nealy 200 years