A British woman bought a brooch for 20 pounds. It sold for almost £10,000.

Flora Steel, an art historian, bought a silver brooch at an antiques fair in the English Midlands more than thirty years ago for about twenty pounds, about $35 at the time. After wearing it for several years on the lapel of one of her favorite coats, she put it in a closet, where it remained untouched for twenty years.

That was until last year, when Ms Steel was scrolling through YouTube on her phone and came across a 2011 BBC story about a brooch featured on the television program ‘Antiques Roadshow’. In the clip, presenter Geoffrey Munn showed a page of sketches of other brooches designed by the same Victorian-era architect and artist.

“I thought, ‘God, that’s mine!’” Ms. Steel said.

Mr Munn said during the show that he dreamed of finding brooches designed by the artist William Burges, calling his jewelry the “almost holy grail of Victorian 19th-century design.”

On Tuesday, Ms. Steel’s brooch sold for £9,500 (about $12,000) to a private collector at Gildings Auctioneers in Market Harborough, England. It is made of silver, lapis lazuli, malachite and pink coral.

“It caught my eye because of the incredible design – the beautiful use of stones,” said Ms Steel, who has been collecting silver jewelry since she was 13.

Mrs Steel was the third person to sell a William Burges brooch by auction through Gildings; the other two also realized the value of their brooches after watching ‘Antiques Roadshow’. One of the brooches sold for £31,000 in 2011 (approximately $50,000 at the time).

Burges, who is best known for his designs Cardiff castle in Wales, made the brooches for the weddings of two friends in 1864, Gildings said, citing notes on the original sketches of the brooches, which are stored in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Ms Steel’s brooch, which has a Victorian Gothic aesthetic, is engraved with the initials ‘JCG’, the initials of Rev John Gibson, a clergyman, and Caroline Bendyshe, a great-niece of Admiral Lord Nelson.

“If those pages of sketches had not been preserved, the association with the designer would have been completely lost in the annals of history,” says Will Gilding, director at Gildings.

Ms Steel, who is from Britain but lives in Rome, said her joy at discovering she owned a long-lost, treasured brooch brought her much-needed joy after two years of treatment for breast cancer.

After successful treatment, she said she planned to donate some of the money to a breast cancer research fund and give some to her son. She also considered setting aside a few for herself for a five-day horseback riding tour of Tuscany, Italy, and a visit to the San Carlo Opera House in Naples.