Behold, American Brontë-Heads: You Can Now See the Jane Eyre Manuscript in the Flesh

Photo: J. H. Thompson /Bronte Parsonage Museum

[Yelling] Where all my Brontë-heads at? I’ve got the news you’ve been waiting your whole life for: New York City’s esteemed Morgan Library & Museum — a museum exclusively for nerds like you and me — will display the original manuscript from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre on its first-ever trip to the States. Are you ready for this???

The manuscript is open to a page in the wildly popular Victorian novel where Jane has rebuffed Mr. Rochester: “I am no bird; and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.” It is on loan from the British Library, a place from which it rarely leaves, and the exhibit, “Charlotte Brontë,” is timed with the 200th anniversary of Brontë’s birth, which was in April of this year.

Additionally on view for any major Brontëniacs are a portrait that Branwell Brontë painted of his sisters on loan from the National Portrait Gallery in London and a blue dress that the writer wore, fit for the frame of a woman who was only four-foot-nine. The exhibit runs through January 2.

You Can Now See the Jane Eyre Manuscript in the Flesh