I personally have never heard about this, and no one has mentioned it on the Bronte List either. I suspect it's probably just a rumour. Do you know where the mss. was allegedly found? Probably not in the Parsonage, since Arthur Bell Nicholls took all of his Bronteana up to Ireland when he moved there after Patrick's death. There has long been a rumour that Charlotte buried letters & perhaps a mss. in the garden of Haworth, but again, no proof. It's fun to speculate though!

I just did a search of CNN's website and the only thing to come up regarding a lost (or found) manuscript was regarding Margaret Mitchell's "Lost Laysen." A 13,000 word handwritten manuscript she completed at the age of 15. That news story appeared in April '97. There were only two Brotne references at their entire site, one about the Tony Awards and another about the William Hurt film of Jane Eyre. I wonder if Holden's father came across the Mitchell article and accidentally relayed it as Bronte? Lori

This sparked my curiosity, so I went to the local college library & searched their indexes of newspaper articles from all major papers. I found an article from February 28th from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a previously unpublished (in America) piece of Bronte juvenalia. ----------- MISSOURI PROFESSOR FINDS A SMALL TREASURE FOR CHARLOTTE BRONTE FANS by Jane Henderson; Post-Dispatch Book Editor A Missourian has excavated a tiny artifact for America's Charlotte Bronte enthusiasts. It's a fossil of the literary sort, archaeology that strained not the back but the eyes of Speer Morgan, an English professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia and editor of the respected journal The Missouri Review. Although the book was bot precisely lost, The Missouri Review calls it a "found text" because it had never been published in the United States for the general public. The tiny book, smaller than a credit card, was written and then sewn together by Charlotte Bronte in 1829 when she was 13. In the tale, "The Search After Happiness," a Byronic hero "of a dark complexion and searching black eye" sets out on a mystical journey and encounters a fellow traveler, who accompanies him for years in a romantic and desolate countryside. [SNIP] --------- I think this may be the "discovered manuscript" as it was in the news at about the right time. Best wishes, J.H.

Ah ha! More Angria stuff! I wonder where they found it. . . Not a major find like Emily's 2nd novel but still nice to have around. I can't believe how small the Brontes could get their handwriting to write those little books. You literally need a magnifying glass to read the text! A very successful way of hiding literary endeavors from Patrick, I guess. . .

Is it possible that you read a review of Robert Barnard�s novel "The case of the missing Bronte"? There a long-lost manuscript of Emily Bronte is discovered by a policeman and Brontefan. Shortly the number of manuscript hunters increases...