In the autumn of 1818, a love affair began when twenty – three year old John Keats met eighteen – year old Fanny Brawne. The thirty – seven surviving love letters and notes shared between Keats and Brawne bears compelling witness of tenderness, passion and intensity. It was the first love most of us dream of enjoying, but with an end so tragic that it proved hard for them to bear.
John Keats maintained a self – mocking distance on the subject of romance. When he first met Fanny Brawne, he worked as hard to disguise his interest as he did to enjoy it.
The poet had written to his brother and sister – in – law in December about Miss Brawne –
“She is about my height – with a fine style of countenance of the lengthened sort – she wants sentiment in every feature – she manages to make her hair look well – her nostrils are fine – though a little painful…but she is ignorant – monstrous in her behavior, flying out in all directions…I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx – this is I think not from any innate vice, but from a penchant she has for acting stylishly – I am however tired of such style and shall decline any more of it.”
Keats had met the great love of his life, but neither he nor she knew. In Hampstead, the young girl was famous both for her attention to fashion as well as for her bons mots. Her uncle was the dandy of the day, Beau Brummel, and he may well have tutored his niece’s obsession with clothes.
Fanny Brawne and John Keats became close in these very unusual circumstances. Both of them would have recognized how extremely financially unacceptable marriage would be between them, yet with the constant ease of access and little thought for the future, the young couple enjoyed many opportunities for ‘tiffing and making up’.
In the early summer of 1819, Brown and Keats left Hampstead for an extended writing retreat on the Isle of Wight. Keats and Fanny were separated. The first letter to Fanny arrives a week later. In this letter and the ones that followed, Keats poured out his heart. He was self – mocking, pleading, vulnerable, jealous, funny, tender and stunningly truthful. Fanny was so affected by Keats’s departure that she became literally love sick. The love between them had not diminished with distance but deepened. In mid October, he writes, ‘I cannot exist without you. I am forgetful of everything but seeing you again…You have absorbed me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.’ He adds ‘On awakening from my three days dream…I should like to cast the die for Love or death. I have no patience with anything else.’
After a long convalescence and repeated bleeding, he began to despair. His letters and notes to Fanny were playful and loving, now it became cloying ad paranoid.
The poems, the letters, the love story are all part of the alchemy that made John Keats so special to everyone. The letters were fresh, intimate and irreverent, as though he was present and speaking. They are intense with his philosophies. John Keats left behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and love letters ever written, inspired by great love for his neighbor, his ladylove Fanny Brawne. The love poems and correspondence composed by John Keats in the heat of his passion and is dazzling display of a talent cruelly cut short.