John Keats’s love letters returned to owner after being stolen in the 1980s

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’ 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’ 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.

The portfolio was discovered among 17 rare books that resurfaced in Manhattan in January 2025, when an unnamed individual, who later claimed to have inherited the books from his grandfather, attempted to sell them to two separate rare book dealers, B&B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books. They reported the sale attempt to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, after discovering the books were listed on the Art Loss Register.

“Manhattan is the cultural capital of the world, home to museums, galleries, and dealers displaying incredible artworks and antiquities,” Bragg said in a statement. “Yet the integrity of this marketplace is undermined when stolen items are on display. We will not allow our borough to be a center for trafficked art and antiquities.”

The books were then seized pursuant to search warrants, and earlier this year a New York supreme court judge authorized the books to be turned over to the heirs of John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Whitney.

The books include a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from 1939, four letters by Wilde that were not included in De Profundis, the letters Wilde wrote to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, from Reading Gaol during his imprisonment for “gross indecency”, and a copy of White Stains by the occultist Aleister Crowley, from 1898.

Whitney’s heirs have said the books, valued collectively at nearly $3m, will be sold and the proceeds donated.