Eight original handwritten letters from the Romantic poet John Keats to his muse and “one passion”, Fanny Brawne, were returned to the family of John Hay “Jock” Whitney, the former US ambassador to the UK, on Monday after being stolen from Whitney’s home in the 1980s.

Keats’ letters, including the first letter he ever wrote to Brawne, are dated between 1819 and 1820. Valued at approximately $2m, the 37 letters are held in a gilt morocco-bound portfolio. Brawne was Keats’s neighbor in Hampstead, with whom he became infatuated and elevated to muse and goddess.

Among Keats’ most famous poems are his 1819 odes, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and To Autumn, which form a cornerstone of Romantic poetry. But his letters to Brawne – in which his romantic longing is twinned with melancholy – stand among his most memorable.

Brawne became Keats’s fiancee but he died from tuberculosis in February 1821 at the age of 25. At her death in 1865, Brawne bequeathed the letters to her children, who sold them at auction in 1885. Their sale inspired Oscar Wilde to write a sonnet, On the Sale By Auction of Keats’ Love Letters.

The portfolio was discovered among 17 rare books that resurfaced in Manhattan in January 2025, when an unnamed individual, who later claimed to have inherited the books from his grandfather, attempted to sell them to two separate rare book dealers, B&B Rare Books and Adam Weinberger Rare Books. They reported the sale attempt to the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, after discovering the books were listed on the Art Loss Register.

“Manhattan is the cultural capital of the world, home to museums, galleries, and dealers displaying incredible artworks and antiquities,” Bragg said in a statement. “Yet the integrity of this marketplace is undermined when stolen items are on display. We will not allow our borough to be a center for trafficked art and antiquities.”

The books were then seized pursuant to search warrants, and earlier this year a New York supreme court judge authorized the books to be turned over to the heirs of John Hay Whitney and his wife, Betsey Whitney.

The books include a copy of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake from 1939, four letters by Wilde that were not included in De Profundis, the letters Wilde wrote to his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, from Reading Gaol during his imprisonment for “gross indecency”, and a copy of White Stains by the occultist Aleister Crowley, from 1898.

Whitney’s heirs have said the books, valued collectively at nearly $3m, will be sold and the proceeds donated.

Little is known about the theft, but at some time between 1982 and 1989, at least 28 of the books were stolen from Whitney’s Long Island estate, and the police were contacted. Whitney, who served as US ambassador from 1957 to 1961 and was the publisher of the New York Herald Tribune, was known as an avid art collector and inherited hundreds of rare books from his mother.

The discovery and return of the books was handled by Manhattan’s antiquities trafficking unit, led by Matthew Bogdanos, a former Marine colonel who has headed the office for more than a decade. The ATU has now recovered more than 6,200 cultural treasures, including rare books, works of art and antiquities, valued at more than $485m, and returned more than 5,900 of those to their owners or countries of origin.

In 2017, Bogdanos ordered the seizure of a 2,300-year-old vase known as the Python Vessel from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Two years later, more than a dozen artifacts linked to the trafficker Subhash Kapoor were seized from a gallery at Yale university.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2022, Bogdanos said that dealers, private collectors and museums lived for years on the fence on the subject of illicit antiquities.

“They’d say, ‘Oh it’s a little dodgy, but who cares. Nobody’s looking.’ But people are looking, and they’re saying it’s not worth it.” He added that trafficking in stolen antiquities “used to be a gentlemen’s sport done by gentlemen for gentlemen. Now these gentlemen and gentlewomen of the trade are getting handcuffed”.