Nineteenth-century English poet, John Keats and his dressmaking neighbor, Fanny Brawne, have total disregard for each other. An unlikely romance develops and they fall deeply in love near the end of his life.
It's 1818 in Hampstead Village on the outskirts of London. Poet Charles Brown lives in one half of a house, the Dilkes family the other. Through association with the Dilkes, the fatherless Brawne family knows Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown and the Brawne's eldest daughter, Fanny, don't like each other. She thinks him arrogant and rude; he feels that she's a pretentious flirt, knowing only how to sew (admittedly well as she makes all her own fashionable clothes), and voicing opinions on subjects about which she knows nothing. Insecure struggling poet John Keats comes to live with his friend, Mr. Brown. Miss Brawne and Mr. Keats have a mutual attraction to each other, but their relationship is slow to develop, in part, since Mr. Brown does whatever he can to keep the two apart. Other obstacles face the couple, including their eventual overwhelming passion for each other clouding their view of what the other does, Mr. Keats' struggling career, which offers him little in the way of monetary security (which will lead to Mrs. Brawne not giving consent for them to marry), and health issues which had earlier taken the life of Mr. Keats' brother, Tom.—Huggo
London 1818: a secret love affair begins between 23-year-old English poet, John Keats, and the girl next door, Fanny Brawne, an outspoken student of high fashion. This unlikely pair begin at odds, he thinking her a stylish minx, while she sits wholly unimpressed, not only by his poetry but by literature in general. When Fanny hears of Keats nursing his seriously ill younger brother, her efforts to help touches Keats; so, when she asks him to teach her about poetry, he agrees. The poetry soon becomes a romantic remedy that works not only to sort their differences but to fuel an impassioned love affair. When Fanny's alarmed mother and Keats' best friend finally awaken to their attachment, the relationship already has an unstoppable momentum. Intensely and helplessly absorbed in each other, the young lovers are swept deeply into powerful new sensations. "I have the feeling as if we're dissolving," Keats writes to her. Together they ride a wave of romantic obsession that only deepened as their troubles mount. When Keats falls ill a year later, the two young lovers face not marriage but separation, in Keats' own poignant words, "forever panting and forever young."—D-Man2010
