{"id":204316,"date":"2026-04-21T04:16:40","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T04:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/204316\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T04:16:40","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T04:16:40","slug":"stolen-love-letters-by-keats-works-by-wilde-and-joyce-returned-to-whitney-family-by-manhattan-da-national-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/204316\/","title":{"rendered":"Stolen love letters by Keats, works by Wilde and Joyce, returned to Whitney family by Manhattan DA | National News"},"content":{"rendered":"

NEW YORK \u2014 Two centuries after John Keats first put pen to paper to proclaim his love for his fianc\u00e9e Fanny Brawne, blotted notes of the famed 19th-century poet recovered from the black market<\/a> were on Monday displayed in a drab function room at the Manhattan district attorney\u2019s office.<\/p>\n

The very first letter Keats hand wrote to Brawne and 36 others, bound in fine gilt morocco and dated between 1819 and 1820, were among a trove of stolen literary gems recovered by DA Alvin Bragg\u2019s antiquities unit and returned to the estate of the Whitney family. Bragg said their collective value was more than $3 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhile the family reported these works missing in 1989, they had not reappeared on the market until quite recently, in 2025 right here in Manhattan, when an individual attempted to sell them,\u201d Bragg said at a press conference.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we were made aware, we executed search warrants, seized them, and successfully petitioned a court of the New York Supreme to return them where they rightfully belong, which is with the Whitney family.\u201d<\/p>\n

Authorities recovered the works after a young man tried to sell them to B&B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books in Manhattan, who reported the attempt to the DA\u2019s office decades after former U.S. ambassador to the U.K. and publishing tycoon John Hay and his philanthropist wife Betsey Whitney reported them stolen from their sweeping estate in Manhasset, Long Island.<\/p>\n

Bragg and Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos declined to identify the would-be reseller at Monday\u2019s press conference, noting he said he had inherited them from his grandfather.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe individual we seized the books from wasn\u2019t even born at the time of the theft, so he didn\u2019t do it, and the grandfather passed away in 2009,\u201d Bogdanos said, noting prosecutors hadn\u2019t identified any individuals responsible for the theft.<\/p>\n

The prosecutor said the antiquities unit traced the books to South Carolina in 2006 but was unaware of their chain of custody until then.<\/p>\n

Among the stolen collection displayed Monday was also a 1812 copy of \u201cAlmanach Imperial\u201d owned by Napoleon\u2019s first wife, Empress Josephine, embossed with her initials and valued at approximately $10,000.<\/p>\n

A significant English translation of the 1882 \u201cHousehold Stories of Grimm\u201d by the Brothers Grimm, worth around $10,000, including tales like \u201cRumpelstiltskin\u201d and \u201cHansel and Gretel,\u201d was also among the cache of classics.<\/p>\n

The trove also featured a 1914 edition of Oscar Wilde\u2019s collection of epigrams in \u201cOscariana\u201d and four letters the Irish poet and playwright wrote in 1906, valued at around $2,000, which were tucked inside a 1906 copy of \u201cDe Profundis,\u201d a letter the length of a book that Wilde penned in jail \u2014 a workaround as inmates were forbidden from writing essays or novels.<\/p>\n

Receiving the works Monday, John Hay and Betsey Whitney\u2019s grandson, Peter di Bonaventura, said his grandparents were \u201cextraordinary collectors\u201d and that the collection was but \u201cone example of their taste and their skill to collect, you know, going all the way back to the \u201820s, \u201830s, and \u201940s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Di Bonaventura said the rare books would be auctioned for charity by the Whitney Foundation, bringing about a cyclical saga for Keats\u2019 love letters reminiscent of James Joyce\u2019s final novel, the 1939 \u201cFinnegans Wake\u201d about history repeating itself \u2014 a signed copy of which was also among the recovered works<\/a> Bragg\u2019s office displayed Monday.<\/p>\n

Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25, with Brawne leaving the English poet\u2019s letters to her children in 1865.<\/p>\n

Though he was among the buyers when Sotheby\u2019s auctioned them in 1885, Wilde was so upset by the sale of Keats\u2019s love letters that he expressed his disgrace in a sonnet<\/a>, titled \u201cOn the Sale By Auction of Keats\u2019 Love Letters,\u201d in which he lamented \u201cthe brawlers of the auction mart (who) Bargain and bid for each poor blotted note.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 Two centuries after John Keats first put pen to paper to proclaim his love for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":204317,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,531,9,24,63],"class_list":{"0":"post-204316","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-manhattan","8":"tag-manhattan","9":"tag-manhattan-headlines","10":"tag-manhattan-news","11":"tag-national","12":"tag-new-york","13":"tag-new-york-city","14":"tag-nyc"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=204316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/204316\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/204317"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=204316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=204316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=204316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}