Last week, New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg, best known for prosecuting Donald Trump on charges of falsifying business records to cover hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, had an easier task: returning 17 stolen books to the Whitney family. Among them was a beautifully bound collection of eight manuscript papers. Attached to the front was a silhouette of a slender woman holding a fan.
like THE New York Times was the first to reportit was found last year by a keen-eyed bibliophile, Joshua Mann, co-owner of Rare B & B Books on Madison Avenue. A young man had entered, trying to sell the volume. Immediately suspicious, Mann convinced the customer to let him keep it so he could determine its authenticity and set a price. After consulting with Professor Susan Wolfson, a Keats expert at Princeton, and contacting The loss of art Sign up in London, he was able to inform the police. He had in his hands some of the most precious and controversial papers in the history of English literature, swept from a shelf in the Whitney mansion on Long Island many decades ago.
Inscribed “Shanklin, Isle of Wight, Thursday”, the first of these begins:
My dearest lady,
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I’m glad I didn’t get a chance to send a letter I wrote to you on Tuesday night—it wasn’t much like Rousseau’s Heloise.
The allusion is to the passionate epistolary novel of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Julie; or the Young Héloïseone of the foundational texts of Romanticism. This was the beginning of the correspondence between John Keats and the girl with whom he became obsessed in the last years of his short life. Woman holding fan in silhouette: Fanny Brawne.
Keats met him in the autumn of 1818, around his 23rd birthday. He spent Christmas with her family. He was not in a good way. He had nursed his brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis and had started coughing himself. Reviews of his long poetry Endymion it had been so ferocious that fellow poet Percy Shelley later suggested that it was they, not consumption, that killed him. Brawne was 18, shrewd and fashionable in a way that suggested she had read enough to see fashion; she had an ease in conversation that Keats found both endearing and disturbing.
The correspondence began the following summer, when Keats was enjoying the sea air of the Isle of Wight. The letters he wrote from there are among the most remarkable in the language, unique in their blend of lyrical intensity and raw emotional exposition. Here is a characteristic passage from the first one:
Ask yourself, my love, if you are not too cruel to have put me through so much, to destroy my freedom so much. Will you confess this in the Letter you must write at once, and do all you can to comfort me in it—make it as rich as a poppy to make me drunk—write the softest words and kiss those that at least touch my lips where yours have been. For myself I know not how to express my devotion to so fair a form: I want a word brighter than bright, a word fairer than fair. I almost wish we were butterflies and lived, but three summer days—three such days with you I could fill with more pleasure than fifty ordinary years could ever contain.
The love was unconsummated, the separation unbearable when Keats sailed for Italy in the desperate hope that the warmer climate would relieve his tuberculosis. He died in Rome on 23 February 1821, aged 25, after asking his friend Joseph Severn not to show Brawne’s last letters to him because of the distress they would cause him.
Brawne married ten years later and lived until 1865. She kept Keats’s letters all the time, saying almost nothing about him publicly. But in 1878 her children allowed editor Harry Buxton Forman to publish them. Charles Dilke, the nephew of one of Keats’s closest friends, was outraged: the exposure of such intimacy to the gaze of the vulgar public was “the greatest impeachment of a woman’s sense of feminine delicacy to be found in the history of literature.” As for Mr. Forman’s “extraordinary foreword,” it was “no less conspicuous as a sign of the degradation into which the bookie has sunk.” Even Algernon Charles Swinburne, the Victorian poet most influenced by Keats, lamented that they should never have appeared, indeed “should never have been written” – not even an unmanly boy “in his love or in his suffering” should “howl and snort after such a mournful fashion”.
The Victorian literary world had by then created a version of Keats it found acceptable: the martyred genius, beautiful and condemned, destroyed by malicious reviewers, his sensual verse a kind of approved pleasure available at a safe distance. The letters to Brawne disturbed this comfortable arrangement in ways that their readers found it difficult to articulate accurately and were therefore attributed to a fault in Keats rather than a blind spot per se. Matthew Arnold, whose influential essay on Keats appeared in 1880, was representative in his concern. He greatly admired poetry, finding in it evidence of a Shakespearean gift, but the personality revealed by the letters struck him as destitute of what he called character and self-command. The lover who wrote of jealousy with such stark frankness, who confessed to spending whole mornings at his window unable to write, who described himself as piloted out of a woman’s dress—this was a figure that Arnold’s high Victorian sensibility could not easily contain. There was something, he implied, not gentlemanly enough about him.
Love letters were auctioned and distributed. Some are held in the Keatsiana collections at Harvard, the New York Public Library, and the house in Hampstead where the poet wrote his great odes to a whistle and a Grecian urn. Now the lost and found will be auctioned again, this time to help the philanthropic foundation that now owns Whitney’s estate where they were stolen from. They are expected to fetch up to $2 million. The identity of the young man who claimed the 17 books came from his grandfather’s nursing home in South Carolina has not been released.
Meanwhile, the romantic impulse to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve lasts two and a half centuries after the publication of Rousseau’s groundbreaking novel. Now Keats’ outpourings of emotion are no longer a source of shame, but rather the epitome of what love letters should be. Not that anyone writes exquisitely crafted love letters anymore.
Jonathan Bate is the author of Bright Star, Green Light: The Beautiful Works and Damned Lives of John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
(Further reading: Ben Lerner has taken autofiction somewhere new)
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