Anthology of Charlotte Brontë's teen poetry to go on display at museum

Few teenagers would want the world to read their poems.

- Lynsey Chutel

LONDON – At 13, English novelist Charlotte Brontë had collected her verse in a humble anthology that already hinted at her ambition to become an author at a time when few women wrote for a public audience.

Written in the winter of 1829, the poems in Brontë's A Book Of Rhymes were penned in tiny script to fit on scraps of paper, no larger than playing cards, that were hand-stitched together with a carefully written contents page.

The writer of Jane Eyre (1847) probably did not intend to publish her juvenile poetry, writing in the inner cover Sold By Nobody And Printed By Herself. Now, about 200 years later, the anthology will be available to the public for the first time.

Last week, in time to celebrate the 209th anniversary of her birth on April 21, the Brontë Parsonage Museum in England published the collection of 10 poems. Brontë died in 1855 at age 38.