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The Secret

Charlotte Brontë · 1833

A page from Charlotte Brontë's 1833 manuscript story, written in the tiny handwriting typical of her childhood juvenilia.

This manuscript page, in Brontë's own tiny handwriting, shows her storytelling skills as a teenager writing in secret.

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Scan of a handwritten manuscript page on aged, yellowed paper. A heading at top reads 'THE SECRET' and 'CHAPTER THE II'. Dense brown ink handwriting fills the page in lines with some crossings-out and small marks.
Charlotte Brontë, manuscript page from 'The Secret', 1833.

About this source

What it is

This is page one of a manuscript story called 'The Secret', written by Charlotte Brontë in 1833. It is written in dense, microscopic handwriting with some crossings-out, typical of the stories she and her siblings wrote about their imaginary kingdom of Angria.

Why it matters

The manuscript shows how, as a teenager, Brontë was already writing complex fiction, though on a tiny, private scale shared mainly within her family. These juvenile writings reveal the roots of her later skill as a novelist and the secretive, imaginative world she built with her siblings.

Look closer

  • Why do you think the handwriting is so small and cramped?
  • What might the crossings-out tell you about how Brontë wrote and revised?
  • Why might this story have been called 'The Secret'?

This book is part of the curated material that grounds the AI version of Charlotte Brontë on Humy.ai — when students ask about related events, the AI can quote it and cite it.

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