Stolen Keats Love Letters to Fanny Brawne to Fetch Up to $2.5M at Sotheby's

In June, Sotheby’s New York will auction eight love letters penned by Romantic poet John Keats to his fiancée, Fanny Brawne, with an estimated value between $1.5 and $2.5 million. Composed between 1819 and 1820, these letters were written during Keats’s battle with tuberculosis while he courted Brawne from their neighboring homes in Hampstead. Following Keats’s passing in Rome in 1821, Brawne concealed the letters, which eventually went to her children and were sold at Sotheby’s in 1885—an event criticized by Oscar Wilde. By the early 1900s, the letters were with John Hay Whitney’s family in Long Island. They were stolen in the 1980s alongside 27 rare books. Last year, a man tried to sell them in Manhattan, claiming they were inherited, prompting booksellers to inform the authorities. In April 2024, the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit returned 17 items to Whitney descendants. The collection includes the earliest known note to Brawne from July 1819, written on the Isle of Wight, with seven of the eight letters lacking postmarks due to hand delivery. Before the June 24 auction, the collection will be showcased at Sotheby’s London from May 12 to 15.