Keats met Fanny Brawne 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.