Fanny Brawne
Frances "Fanny" Brawne Lindon is best known as the fiancée and muse to English Romantic poet John Keats. As Fanny Brawne, she met Keats, who was her neighbour in Hampstead, at the beginning of his brief period of intense creative activity in 1818. Although his first written impressions of Brawne were quite critical, his imagination seems to have turned her into the goddess-figure he needed to worship, as expressed in Endymion, and scholars have acknowledged her as his muse.
They became secretly engaged in October 1819, but Keats soon discovered that he was suffering from tuberculosis. His condition limited their opportunities to meet, but their correspondence revealed passionate devotion. In September 1820, he left for the warmer climate of Rome, and her mother agreed to their marrying on his projected return, but he died there in February 1821, aged twenty-five.
Brawne drew consolation from her continuing friendship with Keats' younger sister, who was also called Fanny. Brawne later married and bore three children, whom she entrusted with the intimate letters Keats had written to her. When these were published in 1878, it was the first time the public had heard of Brawne, and they aroused interest among literary scholars. But they attracted much venom from the press, which declared her to have been unworthy of such a distinguished figure. This may have been exacerbated by the fact that none of Brawne's letters to Keats have survived, also giving rise to her reputation as a cold and unfeeling personage among earlier Keats scholars. By contrast, the later publication of Brawne's letters to Fanny Keats showed her in a more favourable light, greatly improving her reputation.
Life
Early life
Frances Brawne was born 9 August 1800 to Samuel and Frances at the Brawnes' farm near the hamlet of West End, close to Hampstead, England. She was the eldest of three surviving children; her brother Samuel was born July 1804, and her sister Margaret was born April 1809. By 1810, her family was in Kentish Town, and on 11 April of that year her father died, at age thirty-five, of consumption. Subsequently, Mrs. Brawne moved the family to Hampstead Heath.It was in 1818 when the Brawnes went to Wentworth Place—"a block of two houses, white-stuccoed and semi-detached, built three years before by Charles Armitage Brown and Charles Wentworth Dilke"—for the summer, occupying Brown's half of the property. Fanny was introduced to a society which was "varied and attractive; young officers from the Peninsular Wars, perhaps from Waterloo... exotic French and Spanish émigrés...from their lodgings round Oriel House in Church Row and the chapel in Holly Place." After living at Wentworth Place for a brief time the Brawnes became friends with the Dilkes.
Time with Keats, 1818–1821
At eighteen, Fanny Brawne "was small, her eyes were blue and often enhanced by blue ribbons in her brown hair; her mouth expressed determination and a sense of humour and her smile was disarming. She was not conventionally beautiful: her nose was a little too aquiline, her face too pale and thin. But she knew the value of elegance; velvet hats and muslin bonnets, crêpe hats with argus feathers, straw hats embellished with grapes and tartan ribbons: Fanny noticed them all as they came from Paris. She could answer, at a moment's notice, any question on historical costume.... Fanny enjoyed music.... She was an eager politician, fiery in discussion; she was a voluminous reader.... Indeed, books were her favourite topic of conversation".image:Keats House.jpg|300px|thumb|left| Wentworth Place, now the Keats House museum, Hampstead
It was through the Dilkes that Fanny Brawne met John Keats in November 1818 at Wentworth Place. Their initial meeting was cordial and expected—the Dilkes were fond of Keats and spoke of him to the Brawnes often. Fanny enjoyed his company, recalling that "his conversation was in the highest degree interesting and his spirits good, excepting at moments when anxiety regarding his brother's health dejected them"; On 1 December 1818, Keats's younger brother Tom died of tuberculosis, at age nineteen. Keats's grief was deep, as "Some years before, Keats had written that his love for his brothers was "an affection 'passing the Love of Women'"... Fanny showed him the depth of her understanding. She gave him invigorating sympathy, keeping his mind from the past and from introspection; she encouraged his love of life by her obvious interest in him, and by her vivacity. Remarkably soon his own gaiety returned."
In a letter begun 16 December 1818 to his brother George, in America, Keats mentions Fanny in two separate passages. The first: "Mrs. Brawn who took Brown's house for the summer still resides in Hampstead. She is a very nice woman and her daughter senior is I think beautiful, elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. We have a little tiff now and then—and she behaves a little better, or I must have sheered off" ; the second: "—Shall I give you Miss Brawn? She is about my height—with a fine style of countenance of the lengthen'd sort—she wants sentiment in every feature—she manages to make her hair look well—her nostrills are fine—though a little painful—he mouth is bad and good—he Profil is better than her full-face which indeed is not full ut pale and thin without showing any bone—Her shape is very graceful and so are her movements—her Arms are good her hands badish—her feet tolerable—she is not seventeen—but she is ignorant—monstrous in her behaviour flying out in all directions, calling people such names—that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx—this is I think no 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"
Image:John keats.jpg|right|thumb|Portrait of John Keats by his friend Charles Brown, 1819
It was not long before Keats fell completely in love with Fanny. "He had transfigured Fanny in his imagination, his passion creating in her the beauty which for him became the truth; and so she had come to be... the fulfilment of Endymion, the very symbol of beauty, the reconciliation between real life and his poetic quest." On 18 October 1819, Keats proposed to Fanny Brawne, who accepted. Though a significant event in their lives, they did their best to keep it secret. Fanny's mother would not be so welcoming of the engagement: Keats had given up a career in medicine to pursue poetry, which, at this point in his life, did not seem to have great prospects. His family had been stricken with illness, and he was unable to sustain himself financially. Her mother did not outright forbid the marriage, but she withheld her legal consent until such time as there was financial stability to match the couple's emotional bond.
Keats, by February, was at Wentworth Place, where Fanny visited him frequently and occasionally met his friends, one of whom was Joseph Severn. However, "as Keats could not dance and was too unwell to take her out himself, she went to parties with army officers. Through the Dilkes and her mother's wide circle of friends she received many invitations," which caused Keats significant anxiety. This constant presence—which he did not dislike—distracted him from poetry; and although he had in May what is regarded as some of the most productive time of his poetic life, he left for the Isle of Wight in June. Over the next months Fanny and Keats carried on an emotional, anxious, and somewhat jealous correspondence; he wrote of love and death, and in between letters he wrote and revised poems. He returned to Wentworth Place in 1819, physically and emotionally unwell.
In early February 1820, Keats went to London and "returned late, cold and feverish. He staggered so badly that Brown thought him drunk. As he got into bed he coughed slightly, and seeing a single drop of blood upon the sheet said to Brown, 'I know the colour of that blood;—it is arterial blood... that drop of blood is my death warrant.' Later that night, a large lung haemorrhage followed that almost suffocated him. All he could think of was Fanny." Fanny seldom visited Keats in person over the next month for fear of his delicate health giving out, but occasionally would pass by his window after walks, and the two often wrote notes to each other.
In May 1820 Keats decided to leave for Kentish Town; and, over the next months, the two continued an emotional correspondence. Doctors had urged him to relocate to Italy for recovery, as another English winter would most likely prove deadly. He returned, for the last time, to Wentworth Place on 10 August 1820.
Even the imminence of his leaving for Italy did not move Fanny's mother to grant her consent to their marriage. She did, however, promise that "when Keats returned he should marry Fanny and live with them." On 11 September 1820, Fanny wrote Keats's farewell to his sister, also named Frances; and "with consent he destroyed the letters she had sent him." Before leaving, they exchanged gifts: "perhaps at parting, he offered her his copy of The Cenci and the treasured facsimile of the folio Shakespeare in which he had written his comments and the sonnet on King Lear. He gave her an Etruscan lamp and his miniature, the perfect likeness which Severn had painted of him... Fanny gave him a new pocket-book, a paper-knife, and a lock of her hair, taking one of his own in exchange. She lined his travelling cap with silk, keeping some material in remembrance. She gave him, too, a final token, an oval white cornelian." Stanley Plumly writes that this good-bye, on 13 September 1820, was "the most problematic... the equivalent, in Keats's mind, of leaving life and entering what he will now call, in earnest, his posthumous existence."
On 1 December 1820 Brown received a letter from Keats, which he read to the Brawnes, "skipping & adding, without the slightest suspicion on their part," telling Fanny that if Keats's spirit improved, Severn expected an early recovery"; this illusion was sustained, and all of the worst news was kept from Fanny. On 17 February John Taylor, one of Keats's social circle, received a letter from Severn detailing Keats's suffering; "The doctor said that he should never have left England, for even then he had been incurable; the journey had shortened his life and increased his pain.... Severn had tried to comfort him with thoughts of spring. It was the season Keats loved best, and he would not know it again. Bitterly he wept. "He kept continually in his hand a polished, oval, white cornelian, the gift of his widowing love, and at times it seemed his only consolation, the only thing left him in this world clearly tangible."" Fanny wrote to Frances Keats on 26 February, "All I do is to persuade myself, I shall never see him again." "Late on Saturday, March 17, the news reached Wentworth Place. On Friday, February 23, a little before midnight, Keats had died in Severn's arms" in Rome.