Rather surprisingly, it seems that there has not been a life of Keats in 20-odd years, and this happens to be the bicentenary year of his birth. In view of his brief life-span and relative obscurity, he is remarkably well documented - notably by Keats's own incomparable letters, for the survival of which" we can never be sufficiently grateful. The biographies by Robert Gittings and Walter Jackson Bate are fully adequate in their way, but Keats was dogged posthumously for generations with a doomed-young-genius image and an aura of pathos which bore little relation to the reality. He was a lively, intelligent, affectionate young man, at once manly and sensitive, with strong liberal opinions which drew the fire of the Tory literary hacks - who were particularly vicious and scurrilous at this time, even if their real target was often the "radical" Leigh Hunt rather than his proteges. Keats's friends were devoted to him and cherished his memory to the ends of their days, which in the case of several of them was far into Victoria's reign. Fanny Brawne, his fiancee, wore mourning for years after his. death until she married a Sephardic Jew 12 years younger, and eventually died in 1865 (there is a surviving daguerrotype of her, which this book does not reproduce).
Stephen Coote sets Keats firmly in his particular social and literary milieu, and in doing so shows that he made a greater impact on it than is sometimes believed.