BRONTË expert Ann Dinsdale this week picked up a pencil to begin work on a ‘new’ Brontë manuscript.

Ann, principal curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, copied the first words from Emily Brontë’s famous novel Wuthering Heights in a hand-made book.

She wrote: “1801 – I have just returned from a visit to my landlord – the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with”.

Visitors to the museum in Haworth will write the subsequent lines over the next 12 months until a whole new manuscript is created.

This will Emily’s replace original handwritten manuscript, which was lost many years ago, and go on display at the museum in 2018 during the 200th anniversary of Emily’s birth.

The manuscript project is the brainchild of Clare Twomey, artist-in-residence at the museum, who hopes to involve more than 10,000 visitors throughout 2017.

Thousands of pencils, specially commissioned by Twomey, have been produced to write the book, and visitors will be invited to keep these as a memento of their participation in the project.

Brontë Parsonage Museum arts officer Jenna Holmes said: “The lost manuscript of Wuthering Heights is one of the great Brontë mysteries. It’s a simple but very powerful work, which we think will strike a chord with visitors to the museum this year.

“We hope they will find it a rich experience to participate in the mass act of writing, discover what it takes to create such a great work of fiction and engage with ideas around manuscripts and legacy.

“We’ll be updating the story of this book on our social media feeds (#WHManuscript) as the project progresses and celebrating many of the contributing writers and key sentences along the way.”

Clare Twomey is a British artist and a research fellow at the University of Westminster who works with clay in large-scale installations, sculpture and site-specific works. Her work is concerned with materials, craft practice and historic and social context.

A number of her installations disappear or perish in the course of the exhibition period, and often the onlooker is conceptually included in the work. She has exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Tate, Crafts Council, Museum of Modern Art Kyoto Japan and the Royal Academy of Arts.

Visit bronte.org.uk for further information.