Home Arts & Culture Mick Jagger’s letter to Marsha Hunt go on auction in London

Mick Jagger’s letter to Marsha Hunt go on auction in London

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Mick Jagger’s handwritten love letters to his former lover Marsha Hunt will go on the auction in London next month.

Marsha Hunt is an American-born singer who was the inspiration for Rolling Stones’ 1971 classic Brown Sugar and bore Mick Jagger’s first child, Karis.

Sotheby’s said Saturday that Marsha Hunt has tasked the auction house with selling 10 letters written from the set of Tony Richardson’s film Ned Kelly starring Mick Jagger, which was shooting in Australia.

Marsha Hunt, 66, said she decided to put the private correspondence under the hammer because she is “broke” and unable to pay her bills or make repairs to her home, according to ABC News.

“Someone, I hope, will buy those letters, as our generation is dying,” she said.

“And with us will go the reality of who we were and what life was.”

The singer, who lives in France, went on to say that the letters chronicling their “delicate love affair” that was kept secret until 1972 touch on subjects such as the first moon landing and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

“When a serious historian finally examines how and why Britain’s boy bands affected international culture and politics, this well-preserved collection of Mick Jagger’s hand written letters will be a revelation,” Marsha Hunt said in a statement distributed by the auction house.

Marsha Hunt is an American-born singer who was the inspiration for Rolling Stones' 1971 classic Brown Sugar and bore Mick Jagger's first child, Karis

Marsha Hunt is an American-born singer who was the inspiration for Rolling Stones’ 1971 classic Brown Sugar and bore Mick Jagger’s first child, Karis

When asked by reporters if Mick Jagger agreed to having his letters sold off, Marsha Hunt said she didn’t think so, but added that the correspondence did not belong to him.

“This is Mick in his own words…This is part of English history, it is part of rock history, part of cultural history and it corrects all the misinformation,” she said, according to Rolling Stone.

Sotheby’s books specialist Gabriel Heaton said the letters sent in the summer of 1969 show a “poetic and self-aware” 25-year-old Mick Jagger, who wrote about the works of Emily Dickinson and meeting the author Christopher Isherwood.

In his letters, the rock star also touches upon the unraveling of his relationship with singer Marianne Faithful, whom he was also dating at the time, and the death of Rolling Stones’ guitarist Brian Jones.

“They provide a rare glimpse of Jagger that is very different from his public persona: passionate but self-contained, lyrical but with a strong sense of irony,” Gabriel Heaton said.

Sotheby’s said the collection, which includes song lyrics and a Rolling Stones playlist, is expected to fetch between $111,300 and $159,000 and will go under the hammer on December 12.