A University of Chester Professor is one of the first people to see and study a lost manuscript by Charlotte Brontë.   

Professor Deborah Wynne was selected, alongside six other Brontë scholars, to study a miniature magazine manuscript written by Charlotte Brontë at the age of 14.

Hidden from public view for more than a century, the handwritten script forms a missing part of The Young Men's Magazine, a series Charlotte both edited and wrote as a teenager.

The rediscovery and purchase of the manuscript has been led by the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth, the former home of the famous literary sisters.

While the museum already holds other issues in the series, the September 1830 edition remained in private hands until 2011, when it was sold at auction to a French company despite fundraising efforts.

It later resurfaced at a Paris auction house, prompting a renewed campaign by the museum in 2019. Like many Brontë Society members, Deborah made a modest donation - never expecting she would later be among the first to read the manuscript.

Professor Deborah Wynne was selected to study a miniature magazine manuscript written by the 14-year-old Charlotte Brontë (Image supplied)

Deborah said: "I felt incredibly privileged to be part of this project," Deborah added. "It is wonderful that this fascinating manuscript is now where it belongs, in the Brontë Parsonage Museum, accessible to visitors and researchers from around the world."  

After tense auction proceedings, the manuscript was returned to the Brontë Parsonage Museum, where it was carefully examined by the curatorial team to determine how best to preserve and display it.

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Deborah was later invited by Dr Claire O'Callaghan, editor of Brontë Studies, to contribute an academic essay on one of its features.

She added: "I had been given a lovely piece to analyse, where the teenage Charlotte writes from the standpoint of a clothes-conscious, pleasure-loving young French aristocrat, who becomes drunk and disorderly on his first visit to Paris.

"Reading The Journal of a Frenchman conveys an impression of Charlotte's fascination for the material riches of Parisian high society and the freedoms enjoyed by young men of wealth." 

You can read Deborah's essay in Brontë Studies here.