Published from a manuscript bought at auction by Henry Louis Gates Jr., it is quite probably the first novel written by a black woman, as well as the only novel written by a female fugitive slave.
Toledo had once been a Moorish city and remained bilingual until Arabic was banned there in 1580; Cervantes claims to have translated part of Don Quixote from an Arabic manuscript bought on Toledo's market.
After many rejections, the manuscript was bought by Bloomsbury for £2,500.
The manuscript was bought by the present owner in 1988 when it was sold by the British Rail Pension Fund.
Beethoven specialists can only hope that if the manuscript is bought by an individual or a private foundation, it will remain available to scholars.
The dainty handwritten manuscript was bought at Sotheby's by the Musée des Lettres et Manuscrits for £690,850, more than twice the reserve and a record for a literary work by any of the three sisters.
Said to have been written in a three-week frenzy, the manuscript was bought at auction in 2001 for $2.43 million by Jim Irsay, owner of the Indianapolis Colts of the National Football League.
Described as the finest surviving copy of the 15th-century romance Gillion de Trazegnies, the manuscript was bought for £3.8m by the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles at the end of last year.
Mr. Spring said, for example, that Donald C. Gallup, a curator at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, bought 24 of Wilder's notes to Steward, but did not catalog them, and they remained on a back shelf until Mr. Spring traced them.
The manuscript was bought by a British army captain from a second-hand book seller in Naples in 1944, before being acquired at auction for the British Museum in 1947.
