After a Poet’s Love Story Was Cut Short, His Letters Mysteriously Disappeared—Until Rare Book Dealers Acted on a Hunch
Eight letters that John Keats penned to his fiancée before his untimely death are “the literary find of a lifetime”
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A set of love letters from an English literary legend disappeared from a private collection nearly four decades ago.
Poet John Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne that he wished he and his beloved were butterflies and that he could not exist without her, among other messages of devotion. Although Keats died at age 25 and published only 54 poems, he’s regarded as one of the greatest English lyric poets, and his work includes famous verses such as “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” His letters to Brawne, which were published in 1878, also captivated readers for their emotion and melancholy.
After an auction house sold the original letters in 1885 to multiple people, eight ended up bound in a book in the collection of businessman and philanthropist John Hay Whitney. But in 1989, the Whitney family discovered the book was missing, along with more than two dozen other volumes.
Now, thanks to detective work from rare book dealers and from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit, the lost set of Keats’ love letters to Brawne has been found and returned to the Whitney family.
“This is the literary find of a lifetime,” Susan J. Wolfson, a literature scholar at Princeton University who helped authenticate the book, tells the New York Times’ Tom Mashberg. “Every major archive in the world will want in on this.”
In 1818, Keats met Brawne in London and their love affair began. He wrote her 37 letters before his death from tuberculosis in 1821. Other original letters from their correspondence are now stored at Harvard University, the New York Public Library and Keats House in London.
Nearly 40 years after the set of letters from the Whitney collection disappeared, a man showed up with the book at B&B Rare Books in New York in 2025. Joshua Mann, the store’s co-owner, was suspicious and checked the volume against the Art Loss Register, a database of stolen art. The other co-owner, Sunday Steinkirchner, approached Wolfson, the Princeton professor. Meanwhile, New York’s antiquities trafficking unit started an investigation, seizing the book of letters along with 16 other books the man had tried to sell.
This detective work determined that all 17 books belonged to the Whitney collection and authenticated the Keats letters.
“It’s shocking to learn that even one of these letters exists,” Mann tells the Times, “but to see eight of them together is honestly just insane.”
Fun fact: Poet protest
Oscar Wilde wrote a sonnet titled “On the Sale By Auction of Keats’ Love Letters” to critique the event.
The man who tried to sell the books said he inherited them from his grandfather. He agreed to relinquish them. Matthew Bogdanos, head of the antiquities trafficking unit, says the investigation is ongoing.
“We have not identified any specific individual for the theft or thefts,” Bogdanos tells CBS News’ Alexa Herrera and Hannah Kliger.
The other works recovered include a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake; letters written by Oscar Wilde; and a copy of White Stains by the occultist Aleister Crowley, the Guardian’s Edward Helmore reports. Together, the books are worth almost $3 million, with the Keats letters accounting for $2 million.
Whitney’s descendants say they plan to sell the recovered books and donate the proceeds to their family foundation. The descendant who collected the books, Peter Di Bonaventura, tells the Times that the return is “incredibly meaningful for the family.”