A letter hidden away for decades in a private collection has returned home to the place where it was written by one of the greatest writers of the English language.

It is back at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, after a journey of 4,000 miles, where it was penned by Charlotte Brontë to her publisher, William Smith Williams.

The Brontë Society is understood to have paid about £25,000 for the letter, with the help of a £12,000 grant from the Government’s Museums Archives and Libraries office and the V&A purchase fund.

It will remain on show at the Haworth museum until the end of the year.

The letter was written in the parsonage on January 13, 1848, just three months after the publication of Charlotte’s classic novel, Jane Eyre.

Charlotte signed the letter C Bell — Currer Bell — the pseudonym she used for her early publications.

It left the country over 70 years ago when it was bought by an American Brontë Society member while visiting England.

For most of the time in the States, its whereabouts was unknown.

It was eventually inherited by Patti Engels, of California, who this year contacted Ann Dinsdale, the museum’s collection manager, offering to sell it.

Mrs Dinsdale said: “She was keen that it should come back to Haworth and not be sold in America. We were very excited and the Brontë Society decided we should have it.

“It has now come back home to the place where it was written all those years ago.

“Her letters to Mr Williams are very interesting. In this she has written just after Jane Eyre was published and he has sent her some reviews which she comments on.”

Charlotte writes: “You have just culled the best sentences in each review, as if you have been gathering flowers in a parterre, rejecting which is superfluous and unsightly like weeds ...”

Mrs Dinsdale adds: “Charlotte wrote a lot to Williams. He was the first person to spot her potential as a novelist. After the loss of her sisters, she came to rely on his letters.”

It has now joined the 100 other letters written by Charlotte in the Brontë collection.

Charlotte wrote another three novels and died in pregnancy in March 1855, aged 38. She had already lost her brother Branwell, in September 1848, aged 31, her sister Emily, three months later, aged 30, and her other sister Anne, in May 1849, aged 29.