CHARLOTTE Brontë’s ‘little book’ will return home to Haworth following the Brontë Society's success at an auction today in Paris.

The society paid €600,000 for the rare manuscript after Brontë fans around the world pledged money to the literary society's fighting fund.

The book is one of six hand-written by Jane Eyre author Charlotte when she was just 14, and four of the others are already at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.

The Brontë Society, which runs the Haworth museum, today revealed it paid €600,000 (about £512,120) plus auction costs following the four-week fundraising campaign.

Many of today's leading creative thinkers and performers supported the appeal, with the society expecting the book to fetch anything up to €800,000 when it went under the hammer at the Drouot auction house in Paris.

The society today said the manuscript would complete a collection already held at the Brontës’ former family home, being the fifth in the series of six ‘little books’ entitled The Young Men’s Magazines.

Measuring just 35 x 61mm, the tiny tome will join number one, three, four and six in the museum’s collection. The location of number two has been unknown since around 1930.

The Brontë Society was able to buy the manuscript thanks to a grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the UK’s fund to help save treasures from being lost forever, and support from the John R Murray Charitable Trust, The Pilgrim Trust, Friends of the National Libraries, The Aurelius Charitable Trust, R E Chadwick Charitable Trust, The Kenneth Hargreaves Trust, The Gordon Black Trust and Maggs Bros.

In addition the Society raised over 85,000, with more than 1,000 supporters through the charity’s first-ever public Crowdfunder campaign.

This is the second that the Brontë Society has attempted to return the ‘little book’ to Haworth where its journey began. In 2011, when the book was last auctioned, the society was outbid by an investment scheme that no longer operates.

Kitty Wright, Executive Director of the Brontë Society, said: “We were determined to do everything we could to bring back this extraordinary ‘little book’ to the Brontë Parsonage Museum and now can’t quite believe that it will in fact be coming home to where it was written 189 years ago.

"We have been truly overwhelmed by the outpouring of support from people from all over the world backing our campaign and can’t wait to have it in place with the others and on public view to the world.”

Ann Dinsdale, Principal Curator at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, said the return of the unique manuscript to Haworth would be an "absolute highlight" of her 30 years working at the museum.

She added: "Charlotte wrote this miniscule magazine for the toy soldiers she and her siblings played with and as we walk through the same rooms they did, it seems immensely fitting that it is coming home and we would like to say an enormous thank you to everyone who made it possible.”

The exceptional, unpublished manuscript was written by Charlotte when she was just 14 years old and features three intricately hand-written stories: ‘A letter from Lord Charles Wellesley’, ‘The Midnight Song’ and ‘Journal of a Frenchman [continued]’.

The inspirational book is viewed as an insight into the young writer and includes a scene describing a murderer driven to madness, a theme familiar to fans of her most well-known work, Jane Eyre.

Once it is known when the ‘little book’ is due to be displayed at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, the dates will be revealed on the website brontë.org.uk.