ENGLISH ROMANTIC poet John Keats’ love letter to his neighbour and sweetheart Fanny Brawne in 1820 has been sold in London for a record price of £96,000. The letter was sold to an anonymous buyer in the United States.
Brawne was a neighbour of Keats at Wentworth Place in Hampstead, north London, but their love was never consummated because of his ill-health. Keats died in Rome, at the age of 25, from consumption, as tuberculosis was called then.
The letter is one of the celebrated love letters, thirty-nine in total, written by the dying Keats to his fiancée, Bonhams auction house said. However, none of Brawne’s letters to him survive as Keats had asked that they should be placed in his grave. Keats had suffered his fatal haemorrhage on February 3, 1820 and had been confined in Wentworth Place, Hampstead, since then. Brawne and her mother rented the other half of the same house.
His doctors advised him to neither see her nor write poetry, and from just after the attack until mid-March he wrote her a total of twenty-two letters. He died in Rome just under a year later, on February 23, 1821.
He described her a houri in his letter and said he “was in a cage.” “I will be as obstinate as a Robin, I will not sing in a cage.