John Keats to Fanny Brawne
The letters of the poet John Keats to Fanny
Brawne are among the most affecting the world has seen. The one printed here was written on October
13, 1819. Just over a year later Keats died from tuberculosis and Fanny began a six year period of
mourning. Unfortunately, in September 1820, the couple destroyed Fanny's letters to him, just before
Keats left for Italy in a last bid to regain his health. No one know why the letters were destroyed;
it may have been that neither wished Fanny to be compromised in later life by written evidence of her
powerful feelings as a young unmarried woman. They were deeply in love, but well-meaning people around
them did not approve of the match.
The couple met in November 1818 in Hampstead (now a district of London).
Keats was living with his friend Charles Brown, in one half of a large house, Wentworth Place, and
their friends Charles Dilke and his wife lived in the other half. Brown rented out his part of the
house each summer, and in 1818 Mrs. Brawne and her family were his tenants. Fanny became friends with
the Dilkes and continued to visit after the Brawnes had taken another house in Hampstead. Keats met
her at Wentworth Place, and in the summer of 1819 they began to sit together in the garden reading
poetry. Keats, writing to his brother shortly after the meeting, though Fanny,
"beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange."
Keats remembered his meeting with Fanny as love at first site. He would have told her so but thought
she disliked him. In a letter to Fanny on July 25, eight months after their first meeting, Keats wrote,
"the very first week I knew you I wrote myself your vassal; but burnt the Letter as the
very next time I saw you I thought you manifested some dislike to me."
Fanny was 18, blue-eyed, fashion-conscious, witty, and fond of dancing and plays. She was given,
Keats wrote, to "acting stylishly". She was also very small; Keats was only five feet tall and
sensitive about it.
Fanny's widowed mother was anxious that her two daughters should marry well.
She did not view Keats, who in the months that followed their meeting seemed to occupy Fanny's thoughts
more and more, as an ideal candidate. In July 1816 he passed the examinations that would allow him
to practice as an apothecary-surgeon as soon as he turned 21 years old in October. But before taking
up the profession he abandoned the idea and turned his energies to writting poetry full-time. (Earlier
works written while he was an apprentice date from 1814.) His first collection of poems, published
in 1817, flopped. Fanny's aunt thought the poetry a "mad craze". And Keats's health was not good.
In addition, Keats's literary friends disapproved of Fanny: John Reynolds was later to write to Keats's
publisher, John Taylor, about the poet's departure for Italy,
"absence from the poor idle Thing of woman-kind, to whom he [Keats] has so
unaccountable attached himself, will not be an ill thing."
In spite of their deep feelings for each other, Keats had no financial
prospects that would let him marry. He resolved to concentrate on writing to make money and a name;
but to do this, he decided he must move away in order to live cheaply and without distraction. In
June he traveled to the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, seeking sufficient peace and
quiet to write a play. He wrote of his worries in letters to Fanny. His "unguessed fate...spread as
a veil" between them. Returning briefly to London to sort out a family problem, he did not allow
himself to travel the few extra miles to see Fanny explaining in a letter to her,
"I love you too much to venture to Hampstead. I feel it is not paying a visit, but
venturing into a fire."
But on October 10 he saw her again and was overwhelmed. Three days later he wrote the letter
printed here, and moved back to Wentworth Place.
The winter of 1819-20 was hard. On February 3, 1820, Keats came home from
London, feverish and desperately ill. He went to bed, coughed, and saw blood on the sheet. Charles
Brown brought a candles. Together they looked at the blood. Keats said,
"I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood...That drop of blood is my
death warrant."
That night he suffered a second huge hemorrhage. Absolute rest was necessary to postpone death.
Excitement could kill him, so Fanny communicated by notes and small gifts, a vision beyond the window,
a visitor who could not stay. Poignantly he wrote,
"I shall follow you with my eyes over the Heath."
As the disease took deeper hold, his moods became more extreme. He worried about Fanny.
"Do not I see a heart naturally furnished with wings imprison itself with me?"
When she was away he felt jealous, but his jealousies were "agonies of love".
"I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with."
Cutting short a brief, chaotic stay with his friend, the poet and essayist
Leigh Hunt, in nearby Mortimer Terrace, he walked back to Hampstead, arriving exhausted and in tears.
Mrs Brawne took him in, and for his last month in England, she and Fanny nursed him in their home and
helped him prepare to go to Italy, where warm skies and dry air might save him. With death on the
horizon, the love between Keats and Fanny was at its most powerful, enough to "occupy the wildest
heart" as Keats had written.
During the voyage to Italy, he wrote to Brown,
"The thought of leaving Miss Brawne is beyond everything horrible...Some of the
phrases she was in the habit of using during my last nursing at Wentworth Place ring in my ears..."
Throughout his last days, he held a large white carnelian, a precious stone, that Fanny had given him
to cool his fever. On February 23, 1821, Keats died, in the arms of his painter-friend, Joseph Severn.
Unopened letters, one from Fanny and one from his sister, were buried with him.
Text from
Famous Love Letters
Messages of Intimacy and Passion
Edited by Ronald Tamplin