Jacqueline Kennedy's letters to Irish priest to be auctioned off next month
This photo shows Jackie Kennedy at her typewriter in 1960 (AP)
Thirty-three letters written by Jacqueline Kennedy to an Irish priest are expected to be sold for well over $1 million next month by an Irish auction house.
The letters, written to Father Joseph Leonard, a Vincentian priest living in Dublin, "are, in effect, her autobiography for the years 1950-1964," Philip Sheppard, a spokesman for Sheppard's Irish Auction House, told The Irish Times.
The correspondence, which continued until Fr. Leonard's death, covers the whole period of Jacqueline's marriage to John F. Kennedy, her time as first lady, and her grief at her husband's assassination in November 1963.
In one letter, written in July 1952, Jacqueline compares Kennedy, then a Massachusetts congressman, to Shakespeare's Macbeth because of his ambition and worries that he would be unfaithful to her.
"Hes like my father in a way loves the chase and is bored with the conquest and once married needs proof hes still attractive, so flirts with other women and resents you," the then-Jacqueline Bouvier writes.
Eleven years later, the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy describes how she became "bitter against God" after her husband's death, but adds that she doesn't want to "bring up my children in a bitter way.
"I think God must have taken Jack to show the world how lost we would be without him," she writes, "but that is a strange way of thinking to me."
The auction is set for June 10.
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I always admired Jackie Kennedy. I'm anxious to find out how much the letters will go for.