Friends of the National Libraries in the United Kingdom has announced that it has raised more than £15 million ($20.13 million) to acquire a collection of manuscripts that was scheduled to go up for auction.

The Honresfield Library collection includes manuscripts and letters by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë; Jane Austen; Robert Burns; and Sir Walter Scott; as well as roughly fourteen hundred books. Assembled in the late nineteenth century by Alfred and William Law, mill owners who grew up near the Brontë home in Haworth, the collection had been largely inaccessible after the 1930s. When Sotheby’s announced in May that the Laws’ relatives were putting the collection up for sale in three tranches, FNL convinced the auction house to postpone the sale so it could raise funds to purchase the entire collection on behalf of UK libraries. FNL’s acquisition of the library will ensure that the collection remains permanently in the public domain and never lost to overseas institutions or private collections.

Leonard Blavatnik contributed half the total purchase price — in recognition of which the collection will be renamed the Blavatnik Honresfield Library. Other donors include the National Heritage Memorial Fund, which contributed £4 million ($5.36 million), the Prince of Wales Charitable Fund, the American Trust for the British Library, and the Foyle, Berkeley, and David Cock foundations. FNL will donate all manuscripts to eight consortium institutions: the Brontë Parsonage Museum (Haworth), the Brotherton Library (University of Leeds), the British Library (London and Yorkshire), the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Jane Austen’s House (Chawton), the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum (Alloway, National Trust for Scotland), the National Library of Scotland (Edinburgh and Glasgow), and Abbotsford: The Home of Walter Scott (Melrose, Scotland). The books will be distributed not only to the consortium members but also to a large number of institutions across the UK.

“I can only congratulate the [FNL c]hairman, Geordie Greig, and his team for saving the Blavatnik Honresfield Library for the nation, with its treasures now to be owned by some of our greatest national libraries across the UK,” said Charles, the Prince of Wales, royal patron of FNL. “Our literary heritage is our cultural DNA and this preserves it for students, teachers, academics, and ordinary readers in perpetuity.”

(Photo credit: Courtesy of Friends of the National Libraries)