Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass) Frances " Fanny " Brawne Lindon (9 August 1800 – 4 December 1865) 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.
Feb 4, 2015 · For it was there, in the autumn of 1818, that Frances Lindon had been known as Fanny Brawne. And it was there that she met a struggling young poet named John Keats. The anonymous Mrs Lindon was, in fact, the mysterious, unnamed beloved of the now famous Keats. It was seven years after her death before Fanny’s identity became known.
Fanny Brawne friend of Keats Share Learn about this topic in these articles: relationship with Keats In John Keats: Personal crisis …the same time, he met Fanny Brawne, a near neighbour in Hampstead, with whom he soon fell hopelessly and tragically in love. The relation with Fanny had a decisive effect on Keats’s development.
Fanny Brawne was born on August 9, 1800 near Hampstead. After her father died in 1810, Brawne, her mother, and her two younger siblings lived in a series of rented houses. Throughout her youth, Brawne was interested in fashion, was an expert on historical costume, and was skilled at sewing, knitting and embroidery.
- Life
- Posthumous Controversy
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Early life
Frances (known as Fanny) 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 (John and Jane, two other siblings, died in infancy). 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, Mr...
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 (some called it sallow). But she knew the value of elegance; velvet hats and muslin bonnets, crêpe hats with argusfeathers, straw hats embellished with grapes and tartan rib...
The years after, 1821–1865
Fanny Brawne cut her hair short, donned black clothing, and wore the ring Keats had given her. “A letter from Severn to Taylor reached Hampstead about April 16, and Fanny learned how the Italian health authorities had burned the furniture in Keats's room, scraped the walls and made new windows and doors and floor. She read of the post mortem and the funeral near the monument of Caius Cestius and how Dr. Clark had made the men plant daisies on the grave, saying that Keats woul...
The publication of Keats’s love letters to Brawne
Following the death of their father on 21 October 1872, Fanny's children Herbert and Margaret Lindon set about looking for potential buyers of their mother's relics. After negotiations with the Dilke family and R. M. Milnes, Herbert decided to publish the letters in book form and auction them some time after. “In February 1878 appeared a slim, elegantly designed volume of under two hundred pages. Edited with an introduction by another of the day’s prominent...
The publication of Fanny Brawne’s letters to Fanny Keats
In 1934, a collector of Keats donated his collection to the Keats Memorial House, Hampstead, on the condition that he should remain anonymous. Included in the donation were the letters that Fanny Brawne had written to Frances (Fanny) Keats between September 1820 and June 1824. In 1937, Oxford University Press published Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats; and Fred Edgcumbe, editor of the volume and curator of the Keats Memorial House, commented in his intr...
The letter to Brown
There is a letter Fanny wrote to Charles Brown in 1829, granting him permission to reproduce for biographical purposes some letters and poems of Keats's concerning his relationship with her without using her name, which has caused scholars attempting to fit it into her life considerable difficulty—so much so, that the letter is virtually ignored in some major Keats biographiesand written off as unimportant in others. Of this letter, there are two passages in...
Campion, Jane, ed. Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne.New York: Penguin Group, 2009. Print.Edgcumbe, Fred, ed. Letters of Fanny Brawne to Fanny Keats (1820–1824).New York: Oxford University Press, 1937. Print.Flament, Gale. Fanny Brawne reconsidered: A study of a fashion conscious woman of the middle class, 1800–1865. University of Akron, 2007 Fanny Brawne reconsidered. Accessed 2010-06-07Forman, Maurice Buxton, ed. The Letters of John Keats.4th Edition. London: Oxford University Press, 1952. Print.Works by or about Fanny Brawne at Internet ArchiveStudy: Fanny Brawne reconsidered: A study of a fashion conscious woman of the middle class, 1800–1865. By Gale Flament (2007), University of AkronAccessed 2010-06-07"Archival material relating to Fanny Brawne". UK National Archives.Critics and admirers of John Keats have maligned Fanny (Frances) Brawne for many years because apparently, she showed little interest in Keats' poetry while he was alive, and second, she chose...
Aug 31, 2020 · John Keats’s last known letter to his beloved Fanny Brawne was written in August of 1820. To think that this was perhaps the last letter he ever wrote to her is utterly heartbreaking. It is so heartbreaking that I cannot even write about it—not at this present moment, at least.