John Keats - A Youth Elect

Part biography, part history, part literary commentary and part tragic love story, “A Youth Elect” is based on the life of John Keats and his fiancée, Fanny Brawne.


The work employs twin settings and dual timescales: firstly, we are with John Keats, who, ravaged by tuberculosis, or consumption, and having gone to Italy for the milder climate, finds himself quarantined for ten days in the Bay of Naples, in October 1820. During that period he looks back on his life and considers his position as “the youth elect”, the chosen one of his generation, the hero who must be sacrificed, the one who must undertake the quest to discover enlightenment.

For the second half of the narrative, we are with Fanny Brawne, in Hampstead, in the house she shared with Keats, but which is now full only of memories. She is grieving, and feels abandoned, lonely and lost. Through her, the work explores the moving and tragic love relationship between the young couple, and where history has been most unkind towards Fanny Brawne, either depicting her as a weak and insipid young girl, or else denying her a voice at all, I have portrayed her as a strong, politically aware and independent young woman who has an almost equal standing with Keats.

“A Youth Elect” is 92,500 words long and is written in first-person narrative, giving the couple’s story a greater sense of poignancy and expressing not only the distance between them and the separation they must endure, but also the closeness they feel in each other’s absence. The alternating chapters, in which the couples’ thoughts and feelings are revealed, both complement and contrast each other.

Moreover, I believe the work offers a fresh perspective on Keats and his poetry. I propose the idea that the poet did not consider himself a Romantic writer like Wordsworth, Byron or Shelley, but rather, in his choice of Classical myths and settings and in his use of ideas from Spenser’s Faery Queen, he saw himself as a poet hero in the Classical mould, a poet hero in the Hermetic tradition; one who must undertake the hero’s quest, go into the gloomy forest of the soul, into the caverns of the psyche, to explore the darker regions of the self and there, discover the path towards enlightenment.

With this in mind, and emphasising the Hermetic influences that flourished so strongly in London in the early 1800s, especially among the writers and artists of Keats’ immediate circle, I have structured the book so that each chapter on Keats is represented by a major card from the Tarot pack, itself based on Hermetic principles and ritual, where the card represents one step along the path the hero or initiate must take. In this way, Keats takes the journey we all take: it begins in childhood, when he is the Fool taking his first steps into the world; later, he is The Hermit, feeling lost and alone; while still a boy, the card of Death is turned and he experiences the loss of both parents; as a young man, the Lovers card brings him his first experience of love. As he progresses into adulthood, he identifies with the legend of Endymion, the young man on a quest to find true love, who becomes infatuated by the moon: the Moon card allows Keats to free his creative imagination and become the poet he wishes to be…he flirts with different styles and themes, until the final card, The World, where he reaches fulfilment and achieves enlightenment as an adult.