A once-stolen collection of letters written by the Romantic poet John Keats to his fiancée Fanny Brawne will be sold at Sotheby’s New York this June with an estimate of $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
The group of eight letters, tastefully bound in a leather volume, date from 1819 to 1820, a period when Keats was suffering from tuberculosis and often conducting the courtship through the written word. The two had met as neighbors in Hampstead, then a leafy village overlooking London, with Keats telling his brother that he found her “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable. and strange.” They became secretly engaged in late 1819.
Part of a broader corpus of nearly 40 letters, the missives reveal the ardor of young love, as well as Keats’s reflections on beauty, fame, and his own mortality—he would die in Rome in 1821 at the age of 23.
One of eight autograph letters signed by John Keats. Photo courtesy Sotheby’s.
“Over the course of these letters, one not only experiences the evolving nature of Keats’s relationship with Brawne, how he negotiated the jealousies and doubt each felt, but also his own legacy as a writer,” Kalika Sands, head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s Americas, said over email. “Keats understood his life would almost certainly be cut short. And yet, his creative and emotional powers remain undiminished.”
The letters are set to be exhibited at Sotheby’s London between May 12 and 15, before crossing the Atlantic ahead of the auction house’s Fine Books and Manuscripts sale on June 24.
The collection includes the earliest-known letter from Keats to Brawne (dated to July 1819), which was written in self-imposed exile on the Isle of Wight. It was composed in the morning—”the only proper time for me to write to a beautiful Girl whom I love”—and expresses the hope that they could both become butterflies for three summer days, since “such days with you I could fill with more delight than fifty common years could ever contain.”
Wentworth Place in Hampstead. Photo: Bridgeman via Getty Images.
Seven of the eight letters do not bear postmarks. The reason? They were delivered by hand: Keats was convalescing at Wentworth Place in Hampstead and Brawne was living next door (her mother, Frances, sometimes acted as nurse). The proximity heightened the anguish. In a letter from February 1820, Keats wrote of “how illness stands as a barrier betwixt me and you” and “thoughts like these came very feebly whilst I was in health and every pulse beat for you.”
After Keats’s death, Brawne hid the letters, but when she died they passed to the three children she had with Louis Lindo, a Jewish merchant. After agreeing to publish them in 1878, Brawne’s children sold the letters at Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge in 1885, a decision that provoked the distaste of Oscar Wilde. “These are the letters which Endymion wrote, to one he loved in secret, and apart” Wilde wrote. “And now the brawlers of the auction mart bargain and bid for each poor blotted note.”
One of eight autograph letters signed by John Keats to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s.
By the early 20th century, the eight letters had come into the possession of John Hay Whitney, whose family that had built a fortune through publishing and finance, and resided on their estate in Manhasset, Long Island. Sometime in the 1980s, the letters, along with 27 other rare books were stolen, a disappearance that was partially resolved last year when a man turned up at B&B Rare Books in Manhattan and asked for help selling the Keats letters, along with works by Wilde and the Brothers Grimm.
The booksellers didn’t believe the man’s claim that they had been bequeathed to him by his grandfather. After asking to hold onto the works while they calculated estimates, the booksellers contacted the authorities. In April of this year, 17 of the books were returned to Whitney descendants by the Antiquities Trafficking Unit in the Manhattan district attorney’s office.
As to whom might want the Keats-Brawne letters today, Sands believes the scope is wide. “These letters would have broad appeal, representing a highpoint for an institutional or private collection. They are some of the most important love letters in the English language, and their reappearance is truly remarkable.”
