How to Write a Love Letter: John Keats to Fanny Brawne
Andrew Bennett
University of Bristol
This paper will examine some of the 39 surviving letters from Keats to his lover, Fanny Brawne. Controversial on first publication in 1878, with Matthew Arnold declaring that they ‘ought never to have been published’, Keats’s love letters have caused a degree of unease ever since. His often distinctly fraught and sometimes emotionally coercive letters and notes to Fanny mostly date from the summer and early autumn of 1819, when he was away from London on a writing retreat, and from February to March 1820, when he was living right next door to the Brawne family at Wentworth Place in Hampstead but was often too unwell to see her. I will explore the ways in which a letter can distance writer and recipient as much as bring them together, and I will consider Keats’s deployment of literature in the letters as itself a distancing strategy. In the end, the paper is concerned with what Keats learned from his reading about how to write – and how not to write – a love letter.