John Keats - a Youth Elect

Bay of Naples, October 1820. John Keats is dying.

Confined to a quarantine ship for ten days before he can set foot on Italian soil, the greatest young poet of his generation looks back across his short, blazing life. His rise from obscurity. His poetry. And Fanny Brawne, the nineteen year old woman he loves and has left behind in Hampstead, waiting for news that is slow to come and devastating when it arrives.

In Wentworth Place, Fanny waits. Six weeks of silence, of isolation, of being tolerated but never accepted by the small circle of men who surround Keats and have never thought her worthy of him. History agreed with them. For two centuries she was dismissed as shallow, vain, undeserving. This book gives her back her voice.

Two timescales. Two people separated by an ocean and a dying man's failing body. One devastating love story told in full for the first time.

John Keats: A Youth Elect is the story of a poet hero in the Hermetic and Classical mould, driven to explore the darkest regions of the human psyche in pursuit of truth and enlightenment. It is also the story of the woman who loved him, finally given the voice history denied her.

For readers of literary historical fiction, dark academia, and the Romantic era. For everyone who has ever loved Keats.