Thanks, Malia!
I've been flipping through the Fanny K bio looking for some quotes and such to help answer your question. Fanny was a pretty sedate, quiet woman for the most part (which makes sense considering the sedate, quiet environment in which she grew up). After she married and went to Spain with her husband, she never returned to England, seeing as she had little to keep her there. She immersed herself in her home life and her children with little awareness of what was going on back in England as far as the efforts of Brown, Severn, etc. to preserve her brother's memory.
It doesn't seem that she really got in touch with her memories of John until traveling to Rome in 1861 (she was a grandmother by this time). There, she met Severn, who took her around to the different places in Rome where her brother had been. However, when it came to visiting his grave at the Protestant Cemetary, Adami says that it was "likely" that she went alone, and "one of the first things she did was to plant two bay trees at the grave with her own hands."
She and Severn apparently became very good friends. He gave her a copy of his ivory miniature of Keats, which she called "a very good likeness." In fact, it seems that as far as her memories of Keats, she had the most to say with regards to the various portraits of him. Hilton's portrait she described as "not at all favourable" and she was "sorry that Severn's last portrait of Keats had ever been painted" (which one would this be?). It appears that the only portrait she favored was this miniature by Severn, as well as the life mask, which she described as a "perfect, except for the mouth. . ."
As for any of her personal thoughts on Keats, Fanny seems to have left little behind. The book does, however, go into quite a bit of detail about Harry Buxton Foreman's publication of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne. He contacted her before the book was released, but she never replied until afterward, where she wrote: "My enthusiasm and adoration of my dear brother are as strong in me at this moment as when the blood of youth flowed in my veins. Is it strange then, that knowing his excessive sensitiveness, I should shrink at the idea that his most sacred feelings should be conned over by persons indifferent to his merit?" Buxton Foreman and the publisher were adamant in their efforts to convince her that the publication was not out of "indifference to his merit" but quite to the contrary, but apparently, Fanny was never quite alright with it (makes you feel a bit guilty, doesn't it
)
Another tidbit, since we've been speculating about Keats's descendents, is that Fanny was contacted many times in her life by various members of George's family (children, grandchildren, etc.) in America. On one occassion, "She promptly replied asking him to tell her the extent of the Keats branch in America. The response sent her by her great-nephew must have surprised her: he copied out for her the George Keats family tree to date, and in the summer of 1887. . . Fanny spread out the sheet in front of her, and counted up her American relatives. There were fifty-two." So there you have it! Must be quite a lot now!
By the way, dks: there is a photo of one of Fanny's granddaughters, and there's really no likeness
However, Adami does meet with her, and despite any record that there is left behind, she says that Fanny "spoke so often to us of our Uncle John that we felt we knew him quite well." It appears that it was common for Fanny's children and grandchildren to refer to Keats as "Uncle John," so they must have felt they almost knew him
Well, now that I've written this whole novel of a response, it almost seems you don't need to read the book!
