A MINIATURE manuscript written by Charlotte Bronte when she was just 13 has returned to her home in Haworth – nearly 200 years after it was penned.

The last of more than two dozen of the famous 'little books' known to be in private hands was bought by a charity in April for 1.25 million dollars – £973,000 – after surfacing for the first time in more than a century.

Its buyer – British literary charity Friends of National Libraries – donated the book to the Bronte Parsonage Museum in Haworth, where it has now gone on display.

The 15-page manuscript, smaller than a playing card, is dated December 1829, and is stitched in its original brown paper covers.

It measures 3.8in x 2.5in and contains ten poems.

Its buyer has said it is "inch for inch, possibly the most valuable literary manuscript ever to be sold".

It was last seen at auction in 1916 in New York, where it sold for 520 dollars.

Its whereabouts and even its survival were unknown until it was unveiled in New York earlier this year.

At the time Ann Dinsdale, principal curator of the Bronte Parsonage Museum, said she was "absolutely thrilled" by the news that the book would be returning to the place where it was written.

She said: "It is always emotional when an item belonging to the Bronte family is returned home and this final little book coming back to the place where it was written when it had been thought lost is very special for us."

The miniature books created by Charlotte and her siblings as children have long been objects of fascination for Bronte scholars and fans.

Charlotte, Anne, Emily and Branwell evolved a sophisticated imaginary world.

They wrote adventure stories, dramas and verse in handmade manuscript books filled with tiny handwriting intended to resemble print.

The miniature manuscript, entitled A Book Of Ryhmes By Charlotte Bronte, Sold By Nobody, And Printed By Herself, is well known in the world of Bronte scholarship and is mentioned in Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life Of Charlotte Bronte (1857).

James Cummins Bookseller of New York City and Maggs Bros of London, who were selling on behalf of the owner, offered the book first to Friends of National Libraries and gave them several weeks to raise the amount required.

Funds came from several donors, including the Garfield Weston Foundation and the TS Eliot estate.