Bright Star the movie website!

[Saturn]

Do you have a link for this site you could share with us BrokenLyre?

[BrokenLyre]

Yes, go to http://advancescreenings.com/
and you will get on the advancesrceeenings website. Look for Bright Star and follow the directions. Simple. You have to register - it's free. Takes some patience, but easy enough. It's playing in 39 cities in the US. Click on "Bright Star" and scroll down the page to see where it's playing. Hope this helps you all. Fortunately for me it's playing in Buffalo, NY on the 22nd so I can drive to it, not too far a drive for me.

Still have to find someone who wants to go with me. If not I go at it alone. That might be the best. Hope the strangers around me don't mind the crying....

I feel like I am going to Drury Lane somehow...to see a Keats play. Ironic, isn't it?

[Malia]

I hope you will write a review of the movie when you've seen it, BrokenLyre. I've been reading reviews out on the internet as they come along and so far it seems that the favorable reviews outweigh the unfavorable. But it does seem to be the kind of movie that you either "click" with and love the nuance, slow pacing and distanced emotional quality or you think it is the most boring thing you've ever had to sit through. I expect I'll be one of the former rather than the latter. I really enjoyed the Adaptation of Persuasion with Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds and it was all about restraint. If he touched her back while helping her into a carriage, that was high sexual tension!

[Credo Buffa]

Has anyone seen the OFFICIAL official site yet (not the production site, but the movie site)? I didn't see a link anywhere here, so here it is in case no one has posted about it yet: http://www.brightstar-movie.com/

If you go to the photo gallery, you'll see a still of Ben Whishaw looking at Keats-esque as I've seen him yet. I think it's the thirteenth photo in the series.

I also just found out that Bright Star is going to be in Minneapolis starting right away this Friday! I'm already trying to get a group of friends together for girls' night at the cinema. But needless to say, I'll be there no matter what.


ETA: You can also become a fan of Bright Star on Facebook now.

[Raphael]

3) the truth about the relationship between Fanny and Keats is too complicated to portray accurately. Certainly Fanny was not as "deep" as Keats but who was? Did Keats feel a mature love for Fanny? He was never comfortable around women anyway, and it would seem that his love for her was rather obsessive. His letters to her are overdone- someone who is trying too hard. The bottom line is that Keats was much more comfortable with love as an imaginative reality rather than an experience.

Well John was very young and so was Fanny- their love would have changed as they got older as it does with most people. I wouldn't call his love for her obsessive as such- but very passionate- and this is quite understandable given the things that had happened to him ( death of parents, Tom etc), his oncoming illness, his low self esteem regarding his height, and his idealisation of romantic love. I think he just dared to express the depth of feelings other people wouldn't dare to and felt more deeply than other people do. He wasn't an ordinary person; he was something above the ordinary. He was comfortable around Isabella and Georgiana, so he just needed time to gain more self confidence and he would have been able to converse with women more easily.

Who was Fanny? A tart, a socialite, or just a woman with a nice personality and average looks?

She was certainly NOT a tart or she would have gone to bed with John! Not that by today's standard that makes her a tart but it would have back then. I think she was a kind loving girl as she could have walked away from John when he fell ill- she didn't and wore widow's clothes for many years after he died and told John's sister she would never get over her brother's death.As for her looks- she looks pretty in the photo.

After Keats died she wrote some heartfelt things to Keats sister about that loss, but beyond that little is said by her. She kept Keats letters secret from her husband and her kids cashed in when the letters were revealed and auctioned. Did she keep them as remembrances, for their literary importance, or as largess for herself and her kids?

I think she kept the letters for herself- she didn't cash in it was her children.What do we know of her Jewish husband by the way? Was he kind to her?

Who knows. Fanny, as she aged, was said to become matronly. How would Keats have dealt with aging; particularly the aging of the mythic "fatal woman" who will not stay young?

Well he would have aged himself; his glorious russet hair would have gone grey and he might have put on weight- his handsome looks would have slowly faded at some point and lost their youthful brightness, so they would have aged together. Mythical romantic vision is the ideal of youth.His ideas and hers would have changed as they got older as it does with most people.

How would the poet of "La Belle Dame" dealt with a real relationship with a woman over a long stretch? Keats himself stated that he never wanted to marry.

He was in his early 20s and short of money so of course he would have felt that at that point- most young men in their 20s don't want to get married but when they get older that changes. John would have married Fanny if he had had the means to support her and hadn't got consumption. He gave her an engagement ring. He thought it could have worked if he had been free to travel and write; I don't think Fanny would have tried to control, him and forbidden him to explore his poetry at all.
And besides he knew he would have to marry her if he were to be able to make love to her without scandal.

How would a poet who seemed to spend his life in pursuit of mythic Goddess material have lived with a real woman?

Again- that is the feelings and ideas of youth! Older people don't think like that- he would have grown out of that kind of thinking. and anyhow he saw Beauty in Fanny- so perhaps in her he saw her human femininity and her inner goddess!

Keats poetry has still not been plumbed to its depths. It is dense, beautiful, dark, mortal and immortal.

It is the best poetry I've ever read...and imgaine what he would have wrote as an older man..wow..it would have been something else.

[Aquarius]

I'm currently reading a bio of Fanny Brawne, and from the excerpts included from her letters to Fanny Keats, she seems far from being a "tart" or "socialite".

She wrote of Keats to his sister that he was "formed for every thing good, and, I think I dare say it, for every thing great."

She said in her letter to Fanny Keats that the Christmas she had spent with Keats 3 years prior was the happiest day of her life, and expressed much pain over having lost him.

[Raphael]

I'm currently reading a bio of Fanny Brawne, and from the excerpts included from her letters to Fanny Keats, she seems far from being a "tart" or "socialite".

What does the book say about Lindo? Was she happy with him? how did they meet?

She wrote of Keats to his sister that he was "formed for every thing good, and, I think I dare say it, for every thing great."

She was a hundred percent correct on that! Some biographers seem to think fanny didn't know how talented John keats was but I think she did. I think she knew how special he was.

She said in her letter to Fanny Keats that the Christmas she had spent with Keats 3 years prior was the happiest day of her life, and expressed much pain over having lost him

So bittersweet- to have known such happiness to have it snatched cruelly away...

My interest in Keats is intense and visceral. I am fascinated by his likely unconscious compulsion to bring the Goddess back into the world, and the subtle and powerful way he consummated this in "To Autumn".

I like this! I’m a pagan (Druid) and really connect with the pagan aspects of John’s poems- I really love the way he writes of how nature permeates the senses and interacts with one’s Being.( I hope this doesn't offend anyone by the way).

For me there is a mythic cycle in his poetry, something mysterious in the way he works out "straining at particles of light in the midst of a great darkness", that is so full of the basic human dilemma, if one has any interiority, of being full of both darkness and light, mortal and immortal nature

I agree- I find his work has a mythic and deep spiritual quality to it. II could write more on this but I'm getting logged out of the libray again darn it! (no web at home).

[Aquarius]

The bio doesn't go into detail about the personal details of Fanny and Lindo's marriage, other than detailing the births of their children and their activities living in Germany and the continent before eventually returning to London after their younger son finished his education in Germany. Richardson describes Lindon as being no more than twenty when they first met, and that he had a "strong interest and perhaps ability in the arts, and he showed not only those merits of his own which must have been exceptional, but a little of that ardent character which she had ever loved. He offered her, in her thirties, the youthfulness which had vanished so long from her life, and it seemed a return to her early day sat Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place, when she had known the warm affection of her family, the companionship and eager love of the gifted and the young." Perhaps something in him reminded her of Keats? From her description of their social life in Germany, it seems they had a good life together. There's no explanation of how they met, for some reason. Probably through acquaintances?

For the first seven or eight years of their marriage, he knew nothing about her and Keats until he noticed a portrait of Keats in Mrs. Dilke's room. He asked Mrs. Dilke about it, and when she hesitated in answering, "he felt puzzled and I (Fanny), to prevent awkward mistakes in the future, when we got home explained as much was necessary." He still had "a very imperfect idea of the real case."

Severn is mentioned in her bio as well, and there are some clues in some of his letters that he still kept in contact with the Lindons. He wrote in a letter to his sister in Feb 1874 that he had spent Xmas day with his "great fd. (friend) Mrs. Lindon's (daughter-in-law of Fanny)-a party of 10."

Severn after Keats' death always thought well of Fanny. Out of all of Keats' acquaintances, I like him best.

[Raphael]

Richardson describes Lindon as being no more than twenty when they first met, and that he had a "strong interest and perhaps ability in the arts, and he showed not only those merits of his own which must have been exceptional, but a little of that ardent character which she had ever loved. He offered her, in her thirties, the youthfulness which had vanished so long from her life, and it seemed a return to her early day sat Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place, when she had known the warm affection of her family, the companionship and eager love of the gifted and the young."

Thanks very much for this Aquarius! For some reason I thought Lindo was older than Fanny. That's interesting that he was younger than her. I think he must have been nice for him to remind Fanny of John in some way, though I think noone could replace John in Fanny's eyes- John was her great love it seems. Are there any portraits of Lindo? did fanny convert to Judiasm? In the Cootes bio it uses some kind of term I have never heard before to decsribe Lindo's Jewish identity. I forgot to bring my book to the web place to ask if anyone knows what it means ( no web at home).

Severn after Keats' death always thought well of Fanny. Out of all of Keats' acquaintances, I like him best.The bio doesn't go into detail about the personal details of Fanny and Lindo's marriage, other than detailing the births of their children and their activities living in Germany and the continent before eventually returning to London after their younger son finished his education in Germany. Richardson describes Lindon as being no more than twenty when they first met, and that he had a "strong interest and perhaps ability in the arts, and he showed not only those merits of his own which must have been exceptional, but a little of that ardent character which she had ever loved. He offered her, in her thirties, the youthfulness which had vanished so long from her life, and it seemed a return to her early day sat Elm Cottage and Wentworth Place, when she had known the warm affection of her family, the companionship and eager love of the gifted and the young." Perhaps something in him reminded her of Keats? From her description of their social life in Germany, it seems they had a good life together. There's no explanation of how they met, for some reason. Probably through acquaintances?

For the first seven or eight years of their marriage, he knew nothing about her and Keats until he noticed a portrait of Keats in Mrs. Dilke's room. He asked Mrs. Dilke about it, and when she hesitated in answering, "he felt puzzled and I (Fanny), to prevent awkward mistakes in the future, when we got home explained as much was necessary." He still had "a very imperfect idea of the real case."

Severn is mentioned in her bio as well, and there are some clues in some of his letters that he still kept in contact with the Lindons. He wrote in a letter to his sister in Feb 1874 that he had spent Xmas day with his "great fd. (friend) Mrs. Lindon's (daughter-in-law of Fanny)-a party of 10."

"Severn after Keats' death always thought well of Fanny. Out of all of Keats' acquaintances, I like him best."

Yes, me too- the way he cared for John at the end was so kind.

[Malia]

Here is an interesting article from the NY Times about Keats and the way he speaks in his letters and a musing on how Keats might have sounded when he spoke. There's more to it than that, though! I'm doing it no justice Really worth a read

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/01/magaz ... age-t.html

[Saturn]

Great article, thanks Malia. It is an interesting question, one I've written and thought about many times here. I think, from what I've heard of Ben Wishaw in Bright Star, that he gets it just about right; not too Dick Van Dyke Chim Chim Cheree, Knees up Mother Brown cockney, and not plum in the mouth upper class accent either. I think the modern form of [what's now been termed and lamented by many linguists] Estuary English is probably closest to Keats' own speech pattern.

[Aquarius]

I really enjoyed reading that article.

Now I know why Keats has so many misspellings in his letters!

[Bordesley]

Thank you for posting the reference to the article on Keats in the New York Times. In part it reads:

Perhaps this is because Keats was self-conscious about his everyday speech. In August 1818, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine accused him of “Cockney rhymes,” pointing out that he matched thorns with fawns and higher with Thalia. In poems that he inserted in his letters, he rhymed shorter with water and parsons with fastens. The pattern suggests that he suffered from nonrhoticity — the tendency to drop “R” sounds from the ends of syllables and words. As well he should have, the scholar Lynda Mugglestone wrote in 1991, noting that nonrhoticity was part of “then-current educated usage.” In fact, Mugglestone observed, Blake had rhymed lawn with morn, and Tennyson was to rhyme thorns and yawns.

Interestingly this debate or discussion is far from new. In 1926, H. W. Garrod in his book KEATS writes with reference, I believe, to Amy Lowell:

“I find Miss Lowell's book defective in what I call general scholarship. I do not complain of her (as some one else has done) for supposing that Thalia— which Keats rhymes with higher—should properly be rhymed only with such words as Dahlia and Westphalia. But I do complain of her for not knowing, after all the criticism to which Keats' Cockney rhymes have been subjected, the point of the criticism: quite evidently, if she had known how Thalia is pronounced, Miss Lowell would no more have seen why it should not (if it should not) be rhymed with higher than Keats himself. Of Keats' 'Floure and Lefe' sonnet she writes: 'The last couplet with its rhyme of "sobbings" and "robins" really ruins the poem.' That may be so, but Miss Lowell goes on: 'Keats' authority for this was probably his own false pronunciation. Did the middle classes of those days habitually drop their "g's", as did the "swells" of the eighties ?' I suppose I must not ask whether Miss Lowell had a grandfather. My own was born somewhere in the eighties, not of the nineteenth, but of the eighteenth century; I doubt if he ever said, or heard, anything but sobbin’, and the like. But not only that. Miss Lowell thinks that Keats borrowed sobbin' from Wordsworth's Redbreast and Butterfly. Yet is there any period of modern English poetry in which, until you get well into the nineteenth century, rhymes like robin and sobbing were not thought good rhymes—by all good poets ? 'The rhymes of this class were perfect', says Professor Wyld;1 and he does not think it worth while to collect examples—

I suppose that if he spoke Cockney rhyming slang, every time he gave his address as Hamstead Heaf, people must have thought him not as apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary, but rather a dentist. Hamstead heaf - teef. That is Hampstead Heath….Teeth.

[Raphael]

Aquarius, I just read a book called Darkling I Listen (borrowed from the library) last night and the author John Walsh, goes into some detail on Fanny's character- throughout her life. At first it is obvious that she loved our dear John Keats and for some years after was missing him so much, but from what evidence the writer gathers he found that in 1829 she had somehow changed. She described being linked with our dear poet as :

I should not now endure the odium of being connected with one who was working his way up against poverty and every sort of abuse(I looked odium up- it means hate or strong disapproval)


and then she said that she "probably overrrated every good quality he had, but surely they go too far on the other side." She also says he should be forgotten by everyone except her.

I suppose you have seen this before- but I hadn't. The author says that in recent years people have swung so much in Fanny's favour that they ignore this. I'm trying to get a balanced view of it all. Nobody is perfect and we all have our flaws. I don't think Fanny was as bad a flirt as some people think, but I think at times she could have been more caring and sensitive to poor ailing Junkets. And of course at times he wrote some unkind things to her, but probably for a reason- rumours he had heard about her, being so ill and desperate.
But what to make of the fact that by 1829 she didn't want to have anything to do with his memory? I think it shows she didn't want her reputation sullied by her association with him- but was it personal or a society thing? Had she stopped being in love with him by this point? Was she looking now to the future and finding a husband? Of course it is healthy to move forward and find another lover- that's what most people do so perhaps this is not as heartless as it first looks. Yet she says she had overrated his qualities?!
Thoughts ?

[Saturn]

I don't understand the criticism about Fanny remarrying. What do people expect her to have done, moped and cried and grieved for the rest of her life for Keats, would that somehow make her more fitting a romantic poetic fiance for Keats, to waste her life away in mourning ?

I'm sure Keats was in her heart always, but she had a life to live after him, she wanted children and to be married obviously, so after a very reasonable period of time she did that and I'm sure she had a reasonably happy rest of her life.