Fanny Brawne and Criticism

This paper considers the letters and the character of Frances ‘Fanny’ Brawne together as a model for criticism at the present time, as well as a meaningful indication of how criticism was practiced by laypeople in the Romantic period. Focusing on Keats’s great love affair rather than on Keats himself, or on Keats to the exclusion of his interlocuters, I describe the erotic conflict between Brawne and the poet as a form of agonistic engagement between writer and critic–the one tragic in impulse, the other more comic. Toward the end of the essay, I ask how conflict of this kind may be understood, in Stanley Cavell’s terms, not as the ugly underside of love but as one of its most significant expressions, a way of keeping up (in Cavell’s words) ‘the conversation love demands’. Throughout, the essay queries the relation between criticism and love, and how that relation might contest contemporary thinking around affect and pleasure.