Keats, John - Margaret Homans (essay date 1990)

Margaret Homans (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: "Keats Reading Women, Women Reading Keats," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 29, No. 3, Fall, 1990, pp. 341-70.

[In the following essay, Homans examines the reaction of female readers of Keats to his poetry, and observes the manner in which Keats viewed females and female readers. Homans also studies Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne, noting how he objectified and distanced himself from her; Homans compares this tendency to Keats's resentment of the power of female readers and to his attempts to exclude female readers from having access to his poetry.]

This paper began as an inquiry into women readers of Keats and the complex resistance—to borrow Judith Fetterley's term—they may have felt to his representation of them.1 But one can know very little about, for example, Fanny Brawne's apparent dislike of his dwelling on her Beauty, because Keats destroyed all her letters to him, a fact...

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