Romantic poet’s letters to Fanny Brawne, dated between 1819 and 1820, had been stolen from a Long Island estate
Eight original handwritten letters from the Romantic poet John Keats to his muse and “one passion”, Fanny Brawne, were returned to the family of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the former US ambassador to the UK, on Monday after being stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s.
Keats’s letters, including the first letter he ever wrote to Brawne, are dated between 1819 and 1820. Valued at approximately $2m, the 37 letters are held in a gilt morocco-bound portfolio. Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead, with whom he became infatuated and elevated to muse and goddess.
Among Keats’s most famous poems are his 1819 odes, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn, which form a cornerstone of Romantic poetry. But his letters to Brawne – in which his romantic longing is twinned with melancholy – stand among his most memorable.
Brawne became Keats’s fiancee but he died from tuberculosis in February 1821 at the age of 25. At her death in 1865, Brawne bequeathed the letters to her children, who sold them at auction in 1885. Their sale inspired Oscar Wilde to write a sonnet, On the Sale By Auction of Keats’ Love Letters.
