Frances (Fanny) Brawne Lindon (9 August 1800 – 4 December 1865) is most known for her betrothal to nineteenth-century 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.

Life

Early 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.