Mick Jagger's 1969 love letters to be put up for auction

By Mikael Wood

Nov. 10, 2012 9:50 AM PT

Next week promises to be a big one for fans of the Rolling Stones, with a new three-CD anthology due out Tuesday and a career-overview documentary set to premiere Thursday night on HBO.

Now listeners can get a deeper (and perhaps less authorized) look at the English rock band, thanks to a trove of love letters Sotheby’s will auction on Dec. 12.

PHOTOS: Rolling Stones through the decades

Written by Mick Jagger in July and August of 1969, the notes were sent to Marsha Hunt, the American singer with whom the legendary frontman had his first child. Hunt is said to have been the inspiration for the Stones’ “Brown Sugar,” which you can hear below in a live rendition from a concert in Texas in 1972.

According to a report in the Guardian, Jagger describes his admiration for Emily Dickinson’s poetry and a meeting with the writer Christopher Isherwood, whom Jagger evidently hoped would help cast him as Caligula in a film version of “I, Claudius.”

“The letters speak for Mick at an incredible juncture of our lives,” Hunt said. “The summer of ’69 was the end of a whole era of revolutionary spirit -- we didn’t know it was about to die. And who knew that this group of boys making music would 50 years on be still celebrated as a voice of the period?”

Sotheby’s estimates that the letters -- there are 10 in all -- will fetch between £70,000 (about $111,300) and £100,000 (about $159,000), a sum Hunt said she’ll use to repair her house in France.

“I’m broke,” she told the Guardian. “Anyone who has the impression that I have money knows nothing about me.”