Keats’ financial situation precluded marriage to Fanny. Ironically, Keats had an inheritance due to him that he was never to know about, an inheritance that would have allowed him to marry her, lost in arcane paperwork and overlooked. A life changed utterly by an administrative error.

his last request was reportedly that his gravestone should be inscribed, “Here lies one who’s name was writ in water,” and make no reference to his given name. The words—intentionally or not—echo this line from Catullus, “Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua” (What a woman says to a passionate lover / should be written in the wind and the running water). But Catullus did not reckon with a woman like Fanny who was to prove constant, even after death. She was in mourning for six years and only married twelve years after Keats’ had passed away. She went on to have three children and to outlive the poet by forty years.

In passing, it’s worth noting that TB—the cancer of its day—was sometimes known as ‘the romantic disease’. This is from Wiki: “Major artistic figures such as the poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Edgar Allan Poe, the composer Frederic Chopin, the novelists Charlotte Brontë, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, W. Somerset Maugham,  and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the artists…Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley and Amedeo Modigliani either had the disease themselves or were surrounded by people who did. A widespread belief was that tuberculosis assisted artistic talent, as witness the number of great artists who were affected. Physical mechanisms proposed for this effect included the slight fever and the toxaemia, (blood poisoning), caused by the disease, which allegedly helped them to see life more clearly and to act decisively.