 The Brontes are an extraordinary family to have three great writers from one family. I think it's got so many kind of potent aspects to the Brontes story. The nature of the Brontes writings, which is so powerful and so original. When you look at their works, they reflect this wider, broad, exciting world and they really got to know the world through books and that's reflected in their writing and that's really, really quite beautiful. I think they're all really powerful after you've closed the book, the images stay in your head for a lifetime. The discovery of this collection was hugely significant. It charts the whole of the Brontes development as writers, as well as providing such rich material on their lives. When the Brontes material that had been allocated to the Parsonage arrived in Haworth in July, the moment when we unpacked it, it was just incredible. It was really quite emotional. But one of the treasures, which is now at the Parsonage, is this tiny volume and these are meant to look like printed books, like the kind of books such as Blackwood's magazine, which came into the Parsonage and was read avid late by all the Brontes. The handwriting is minuscule and I think when we think about the Brontes biographies about how they really experience loss at such a young age, losing their mother and their siblings, it suddenly makes sense. I can barely read the handwriting in these volumes. It keeps adults out. It's a world that children can control themselves. They have agency over it. This was part of a sequence of six tiny books. So when the collection came to light, we've now been able to retrieve this little book and return it to Haworth where it was written on where we can display it. So it's completed that whole series. The objects that have been allocated to the British Library, they are now with other Bronte material. They can be compared and studied within their small group and actually with wider objects within the library. We've got a letter from Charlotte Bronte written in 1847. It's a really interesting letter because it talks about the identity of Cara, Ellis and Acton Bell and indeed it also talks about the authorship of the 1846 volume of poems by the three sisters. One of the really star items here at the British Library is Emily Bronte's own copy of poems by Cara, Ellis and Acton Bell, which is the sister's first publication together when they were still writing anonymously. It's really really special because she has gone all the way through and she's written the date that she composed each of her poems and I think that will just be really important for researchers going forward what she was doing on those specific days and why she might have been inspired to write particular poems. The copy of Shirley that we got from the Hollinsfield Library is really fascinating I think so it has a letter from Charlotte Bronte bound inside it. It's from Charlotte, her editor saying the book is now finished, thank God, which I think is like a really humanising moment. I think that's a very nice story in the manuscript material where you particularly see the sisters developing as writers. One of the lovely things on the table behind me is one of Charlotte's little books where she's really beginning to make that transition from a child who's interested in books and writing in fantasy worlds and really beginning to think about how she might present herself as a more mature author in the outside world. This is called Farside Tales, she wrote up while she was working at Rowhead School and it has this wonderful opening line where she says, reader I'll tell you what my heart is like to break. She's a wonderful prefiguring of that famous line from Jane Eyre where she says, reader I married him so you can just hear that voice emerging from this very early text. So these tell us a great deal about the writers and about their relationships and also what feeds into their imaginative lives as writers. In this first edition of Wuthering Heights we've got a lovely example of the kind of thing that scholars are going to be looking for in these printed works so there's a little annotation at the bottom of the page there which we believe is from William Law and he's talking about the birds that are part of this page here and he's gone to look them up in Buick which is of course Buick's Birds and rather wonderfully the Bronte's own version of Buick's Birds was also part of this Honors Field collection. And of course there's an important link with the novels in that it was Buick's Birds that Jane Eyre is reading in the window seat at Gateshead Hall and some of the kind of lonely arctic landscapes that Buick illustrates kind of sum up Jane's isolation. I think it's really amazing that this collection has been saved for the nation. They've not been bought by private collectors, the public owns these objects and that's so important because they're absolutely incredible.