Eight original handwritten letters from the Romantic poet John Keats to his muse Fanny Brawne have been returned to the family of John Hay 'Jock' Whitney, the former US ambassador to the UK, after being stolen from a Long Island estate in the 1980s. The letters, dated between 1819 and 1820, include the first letter Keats ever wrote to Brawne and are valued at approximately $2m.
The letters were discovered among 17 rare books that surfaced in Manhattan in January 2025, when an unnamed individual attempted to sell them to two rare book dealers. The dealers reported the sale attempt to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg after finding the books listed on the Art Loss Register. The books were subsequently seized, and a New York Supreme Court judge authorised their return to the Whitney heirs.
Keats’s letters to Brawne, his neighbour in Hampstead, are renowned for their romantic longing and melancholy. Brawne became Keats’s fiancée, but he died from tuberculosis in February 1821 at the age of 25. After her death in 1865, Brawne bequeathed the letters to her children, who sold them at auction in 1885, inspiring Oscar Wilde to write a sonnet on the sale.
The portfolio containing the letters was held in a gilt morocco-bound portfolio alongside other rare items, including a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, four letters by Wilde, and a copy of Aleister Crowley’s White Stains. The Whitney heirs have stated that the collection, valued at nearly $3m, will be sold and the proceeds donated.
The recovery was led by the Manhattan Antiquities Trafficking Unit, which has now recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures. Matthew Bogdanos, the unit’s head, emphasised the importance of cracking down on the illicit antiquities trade, stating that 'gentlemen and gentlewomen of the trade are getting handcuffed.'
