Fanny Brawne

Frances (Fanny) Brawne Lindon (9 August 1800 – 4 December 1865) is best known for her betrothal to English Romantic poet John Keats, a fact largely unknown until 1878, when Keats's letters to her were published. Their engagement, lasting from December 1818 until Keats's death in February 1821, spanned some of the most poetically productive years of his 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, Mrs. Brawne moved the family to Hampstead Heath.

It was in 1818 that 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.

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 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”.

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