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  • Published: 8 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141442471
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $22.99

So Bright and Delicate: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne




Published to coincide with the release of the film Bright Star, written and directed by Oscar Winner Jane Campion (The Piano, In the Cut), starring Abbie Cornish (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and Ben Whishaw (Brideshead Revisited, Perfume)

Published to coincide with the release of the film Bright Star, written and directed by Oscar Winner Jane Campion (The Piano, In the Cut), starring Abbie Cornish (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and Ben Whishaw (Brideshead Revisited, Perfume)

John Keats died aged just twenty-five. He left behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and love letters ever written, inspired by his great love for Fanny Brawne. Although they knew each other for just a few short years and spent a great deal of that time apart - separated by Keats' worsening illness, which forced a move abroad - Keats wrote again and again about and to his love, right until his very last poem, called simply 'To Fanny'. She, in turn, would wear the ring he had given her until her death. So Bright and Delicate is the passionate, heartrending story of this tragic affair, told through the private notes and public art of a great poet.

  • Published: 8 December 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141442471
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 160
  • RRP: $22.99

Other books in the series

Maldoror and Poems
On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the authors

John Keats

John Keats was born in October 1795, son of the manager of a livery stable in Moorfields. His father died in 1804 and his mother, of tuberculosis, in 1810. By then he had received a good education at John Clarke's Enfield private school. In 1811 he was apprenticed to a surgeon, completing his professional training at Guy's Hospital in 1816. His decision to commit himself to poetry rather than a medical career was a courageous one, based more on a challenge to himself than any actual achievement.

His genius was recognized and encouraged by early Mends like Charles Cowden Clarke and J. H. Reynolds, and in October 1816 he met Leigh Hunt, whose Examiner had already published Keats's first poem. Only seven months later Poems (1817) appeared. Despite the high hopes of the Hunt circle, it was a failure. By the time Endymion was published in 1818 Keats's name had been identified with Hunt's 'Cockney School', and the Tory Blackwood's Magazine delivered a violent attack on Keats as a lower-class vulgarian, with no right to aspire to 'poetry'.

But for Keats fame lay not in contemporary literary politics but with posterity. Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth were his inspiration and challenge. The extraordinary speed with which Keats matured is evident from his letters. In 1818 he had worked on the powerful epic fragment Hyperion, and in 1819 he wrote 'The Eve of St Agnes', 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', the major odes, Lamia, and the deeply exploratory Fall of Hyperion. Keats was already unwell when preparing the 1820 volume for the press; by the time it appeared in July he was desperately ill. He died in Rome in 1821. Keats's final volume did receive some contemporary critical recognition, but it was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that his place in English Romanticism began to be recognized, and not until this century that it became fully recognized.