John Keats Love Letters, Stolen in the 1980s, Head to Sotheby’s With $2.5 Million Estimate
A group of eight autograph letters signed by English poet John Keats (1795–1821) to Fanny Brawne is set to come to auction at Sotheby’s New York in June, carrying an estimate of $1.5 million to $2.5 million. The letters, written between 1819 and 1820, chart one of the most closely read romances in English literature, while also revealing Keats’s preoccupation with illness, beauty, fame, and the brevity of his own life.
The earliest known letter in the group, dated July 1819, was written during Keats’s self-imposed stay on the Isle of Wight. In it, he describes writing in the morning, “the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love,” and imagines the pair as butterflies for three summer days, a fleeting image that captures the urgency of the correspondence. The letters are part of a broader body of nearly 40 surviving missives between the poet and Brawne.
Seven of the eight letters bear no postmarks because they were delivered by hand. At the time, Keats was convalescing at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, and Brawne lived next door; her mother, Frances, sometimes acted as nurse. That physical closeness sharpened the emotional strain. In a February 1820 letter, Keats wrote of “how illness stands as a barrier betwixt me and you” and recalled that such thoughts had once come “very feebly” to him, “whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you.”
The letters were later hidden by Brawne after Keats’s death in Rome in 1821, when he was 23. They eventually passed to her three children with Louis Lindo, a Jewish merchant, and were sold in 1885 at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge after being published in 1878. Oscar Wilde objected to that sale in famously caustic terms, lamenting the auction of “each poor blotted note.”
By the early 20th century, the letters belonged to John Hay Whitney, whose family fortune came from publishing and finance and who lived on an estate in Manhasset, Long Island. In the 1980s, the letters were stolen along with 27 other rare books. The case resurfaced last year when a man brought the Keats letters, along with works by Wilde and the Brothers Grimm, to B &B Rare Books in Manhattan and asked for help selling them. The booksellers alerted authorities, and in April 17 of the books were returned to Whitney descendants by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
Sotheby’s says the letters will be exhibited in London from May 12 to 15 before crossing the Atlantic for the June 24 sale. For collectors, the appeal is literary and historical at once: a rare surviving record of Keats’s private life, and a manuscript group whose disappearance and recovery have only deepened its significance.
