Overview
- Eight letters John Keats wrote to his fiancée Fanny Brawne are now on public display at Sotheby’s New Bond Street before a planned June sale in New York estimated at $1.5 million to $2.5 million.
- The group resurfaced in New York this year when a man brought them to a Manhattan rare book dealer, who alerted authorities.
- Following coordination with the Manhattan district attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, the letters were returned in April to the Whitney estate, which had owned them before the theft.
- The papers were stolen in the 1980s from the Whitney family collection and form part of a larger set of about 37 letters Keats wrote in 1819–1820.
- The London viewing is the first public showing there in roughly 140 years, and the letters’ hand-delivered notes between neighboring houses explain why most lack postmarks.