Jacqueline Kennedy’s private letters, chronicling her previously unknown relationship with an Irish priest, sat untouched in a college safe for 50 years, before an antiques roadshow brought them to light.
Staffers at All Hallows College in Dublin touched off the unlikely chain of events back in February, when they brought a 500-year-old book to an event similar to the hit PBS show “Antiques Roadshow.”
Sheppard’s Auction House was the event’s sponsor and Felix O’Neill, an expert on rare books, was blown away by the school’s “Book of Hours,” published in 1460 and believed to have once belonged to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, according to the Irish Times.
After that “Book of Hours” score, the college invited O’Neill to campus to search for other potentially valuable artifacts.
O’Neill said he immediately recognized the significance of the Kennedy letters, adding, “And the college desperately needs money.”
Sheppard’s Auction House is set next month to sell 33 letters Jackie penned to the Rev. Joseph Leonard, a Vincentian priest who spent his final years at the All Hallows Church rectory, between 1950 and 1964.
The letters are expected to fetch as much as $1.65 million when they go under the hammer on June 10.
In 1950, Jacqueline Bouvier had just finished a year studying in France when she and step-brother Hugh Dudley Auchincloss III visited Dublin and looked up Leonard, a family friend.
Leonard was a 79-year-old retired French literature professor at the college, living at the school rectory, when Jackie came to town.
The future first lady immediately took to the priest and professed her love for Ireland.
“You gave us such a lovely time in Ireland — I can’t really describe what I want to say,” Jackie wrote to Leonard, “but all the other places I’ve travelled to have become a blur and I have to think hard to bring back the memories of things I saw and people I met and places I ate — but with Ireland every second has remained clear and I can remember it down to the last word of every conversation.”
She thanked Leonard, who had supplied her and Auchincloss with “endless boxes of candy and cigarettes and books and pictures and postcards and pencils and poems and lunches and teas” in Dublin.
After leaving Ireland, the American socialite told Leonard she felt “homesick” for the Emerald Isle.
“I have always been glad to move on before, but we were really both miserable at leaving Ireland and though we are having a lovely trip, we are still homesick for it,” she wrote.
Jackie held nothing back in her letters to Leonard, and even described her desire to get married.
The priest suggested she look up a local 24-year-old, Declan Costello.
She wrote back and said Costello “sounds like absolute heaven.”
Costello went on to marry Joan Fitzsimmons and became Irish attorney general.