I am especially grateful to the Brontë Society for their permission to publish transcriptions of many of the manuscript letters in the Bonnell, Grolier, Seton-Gordon, and Brontë Society collections, and for the prompt and courteous response of the staff of the Brontë Parsonage Museum to my requests.
I acknowledge with thanks the permission of the following libraries to reproduce my transcriptions of manuscripts in their collections: the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for Autograph b.9 no. 264; the British Library for manuscripts in Ashley MSS 161, 164, 172, 2452 and in Additional MSS 38732 and 39763; the Syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, to whom rights in this publication are assigned, for six manuscript letters; and the Houghton Library, Harvard University, for five manuscript letters in the Harry Elkins Widener Collection, and three letters with the call number MS Eng. 871. I thank Richard Workman and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center for their acknowledgement of my notification of intent to quote from or publish manuscripts in the Research Center Collection. I am grateful to Mr Peter Henderson, Walpole Librarian, for permission to publish a letter in the Hugh Walpole Collection at the King’s School, Canterbury. For permission to reproduce letters in their respective collections, I thank David S. Zeidberg, Director, and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California; Wayne Furman, the Berg Collection of English and American Literature and the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, the New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, Charles E. Pierce, Jr., and The Morgan Library and Museum, New York (MA 2696); Margaret Sherry Rich and Princeton University Library, for letters in the Robert H. Taylor Collection and the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. The letter from Charlotte Brontë to Elizabeth Gaskell of 27 August 1850 in the Devonshire Collection, Chatsworth, is published by permission of the Duke of Devonshire. The arrangement of this volume owes much to Alan G. Hill’s exemplary selected Letters of William Wordsworth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Finally, I thank Andrew McNeillie, Jacqueline Baker, and Elizabeth Robottom for their encouragement and advice, and I gratefully acknowledge Sylvie Jaffrey’s meticulous copy editing, and Ruth Freestone King’s proof reading.