Keats and Fanny first met in the midst of great personal turmoil for the poet.  His youngest brother Tom was desperately ill with tuberculosis; it had already killed their mother, would soon claim Tom and later Keats himself.   And when their relationship began, its greatest obstacle was not illness but money. 

    It was the autumn of 1818.  Keats had recently returned from a walking tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown.  Brown had rented out his half of the double house called Wentworth Place to the Brawne family.  When he returned, the Brawnes moved to Elm Cottage, a brief walk away.  But while they had lived at Wentworth Place, they had become close friends with Brown’s neighbors (and Keats’s friends), the kindly Dilke family.  The Dilkes had spoken often of Keats, praising him in the highest terms.  And so when the Brawne family finally met the esteemed young Mr Keats, they were prepared to like him.

Mrs Brawne was widowed and had three children – 18 year old Fanny, 14 year old son Sam and 9 year old daughter Margaret.  The teenaged Fanny was not considered beautiful, but she was spirited and kind.  She was also a realist and immensely practical, perhaps as a result of her family’s straitened circumstances.  She took great care with her appearance and enjoyed flirting with young admirers.  As Hampstead was close to an army barracks, there were numerous military dances throughout the year.  Fanny was a popular participant.  When they first met, Keats was struck by her coquettish sense of fun, and it later pricked his jealousy too often for comfort.  ’My greatest torment since I have known you has been the fear of you being a little inclined to the Cressid,’ he would tell her later, referring to Chaucer’s infamous flirt.

    They met at the Dilkes’ home, as Fanny later recalled, and ‘[Keats's] conversation was in the highest degree interesting and his spirits good, excepting at moments when anxiety regarding his brother’s health dejected them.’  Indeed, Keats, whatever his first impressions of young Miss Brawne, was too caught up with his younger brother’s decline to ponder any attraction.  By the end of November, with Tom close to death, Keats spent nearly every waking moment at Tom’s bedside.  The little rooms at Well Walk, once the scene of close companionship for the Keats brothers, were now haunted with disappointment, despair and grief.  When Tom died on 1 December, Keats was worn and numb.  The memory of Tom’s terrible, lingering illness would never be forgotten.

    But he at least had a welcome distraction in Fanny Brawne.  Eager to escape Well Walk, he gladly accepted Brown’s invitation to share Wentworth Place with him.  This was not charity on Brown’s part; Keats paid him the normal rate for lodging.  Since he now lived next door to the Dilkes, Keats visited with more frequency.  And each time, the brown-haired, blue-eyed Fanny made a greater impression.  She both confused and exasperated Keats, and therein lay her attraction.  He simply could not understand her.  In mid-December, two weeks after Tom’s death, he wrote a long letter to George and Georgiana in America.  Its contents spanned a fortnight and Fanny is notably mentioned:  ’Mrs Brawne 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.’  And later the poet gave the more vivid description cited at the top of this section.

    Keats was able to occasionally dismiss Fanny from his mind.  She rates only a passing mention in a mid-February letter to George (he and Fanny have an occasional ‘chat and a tiff’).  Poetry had once more become a consuming passion.  But it would only be a matter of time before both Fanny and poetry occupied positions of equal importance in his life.  We know little of Fanny’s literary inclinations, but Keats – who had once commented, ‘I have met with women who I really think would like to be married to a Poem and to be given away by a Novel’ – was not seeking poetic validation from Fanny.  Though she read his work, and admired it, she did not participate in its creation.

Mrs Brawne had by now realized the serious course of Keats and Fanny’s relationship; she could not have been very pleased.  Keats was a kind and intelligent young man, but he was poor and his chosen career offered little hope of success.  But her own good nature could not prevent a love match.  She grew fond of the poet and later nursed him through his illness.  

    But Brown was not happy about the relationship.  He disliked Fanny, perhaps out of jealousy because she consumed much of Keats’s time and thought.  Perhaps, too, he understood the depth of Keats’s feelings and Fanny’s casual, flirtatious attitude with other men (Brown included) indicated a far more shallow attachment on her part.  He did not encourage their courtship and, amongst the poet’s friends (with the exception of the Dilkes), Fanny was viewed somewhat askance.  They noticed her teasing behavior and the depression and jealousy it aroused in Keats.  Distracted by such antics, how could Keats write? 

    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.