Newly Recovered Love Letters by John Keats Could Net $2 Million at Auction

"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."

""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 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.""

Eight letters written by Romantic poet John Keats to his fiancée Fanny Brawne, dated 1819 to 1820, will be sold at Sotheby’s New York in June with an estimate of $1.5 million to $2.5 million. The letters reflect their secret engagement, their courtship conducted through writing while Keats suffered from tuberculosis, and his reflections on beauty, fame, and mortality. Keats met Brawne as neighbors in Hampstead and later wrote from the Isle of Wight in July 1819, describing the morning as the proper time to write and imagining shared summer days as butterflies. The collection will be exhibited in London before the New York auction.

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