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Joseph Severn, A Life
The Rewards of Friendship
Sue Brown
432 pages
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Numerous black-and-white in-text illustrations and plates
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234x156mm
978-0-19-956502-3
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Hardback
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08 October 2009
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- Fills a longstanding and important gap in the knowledge of Keats and his circle
- Provides new information about Keats's death - one of the iconic events in English literary history
- Gives the first full assessment of Severn's artistic and diplomatic career
- Includes a rare description, with new information, of the nineteenth-century British community in Rome
- Supplemented with 30 illustrations - 12 of previously unpublished material, including an unknown sketch of Keats and the earliest portrait of Gladstone
This biography of Joseph Severn (1793-1879), the best known but most controversial of Keats's friends, is based on a mass of newly discovered information, much of it still in private hands. Severn accompanied the dying Keats to Italy, nursed him in Rome and reported on his last weeks there in a famous series of moving letters. After Keats's death in relative obscurity, Severn pressed hard for an early biography and a more fitting memorial in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.
In the nineteenth century Severn's friendship with Keats was seen as a
model of devoted masculine companionship and he was reburied by popular acclaim next to Keats in 1882. In the twentieth century, by contrast, he was denigrated as an unreliable, self-promoting witness. Sue Brown's book fills a major gap in studies of Keats and his circle. It reassesses Severn's character, friendship with Keats, and influence on the posthumous development of the poet's fame and provides new information on Keats's death.
The significance of Severn's artistic career has previously been downplayed. This book offers the first full assessment of his work and of his turbulent spell as British Consul in Rome from 1860 to 1871. Keats was not Severn's only famous friend. For most of his adult life Severn was at the heart of the large, lively British community
in Rome welcoming amongst others Gladstone, who became his most important patron, Ruskin, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Turner, Samuel Palmer, David Wilkie, and many more. He maintained long friendships with Leigh Hunt, Mary Shelley, Charles Eastlake, Richard Monckton Milnes, amongst others, and enjoyed a rich family life.Readership: Readers with an interest in Keats; art historians; Italophiles; students and scholars of the Romantic period as well as the interested general reader.
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Sue Brown, Independent scholar Sue Brown is an independent scholar based in London and Malta. She read history at Oxford and Toronto Universities. For over thirty years she was a career civil servant, including spells with the British Embassy in Washington and as Head of the Arts Division at the Department of National Heritage. She has published a number of articles on Gladstone and on Severn and co-edited with Grant Scott New Letters of Charles Brown to Joseph Severn (2007).
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"Sue Brown's lively new biography of Severn will be an invaluable contribution to Romantic scholarship" - Keats-Shelley Journal "Crisply written and clear-sighted biography...in Sue Brown's hands he [Joseph Severn] becomes a cockney chancer, a charming maverick, a spinner of yarns whose name will never be writ in water." - Frances Wilson, Times Literary Supplement "Sue Brown's is as full, fine and sensitive an account of his life as could be wished for" - Ann Wroe, The Tablet
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Introduction
1: A Hazardous Childhood
2: The Royal Academy Student
3: Painter and Poet
4: The Warm South
5: Piazza di Spagna
6: 'Thanks Joe'
7: 'The Most Striking Year of My Life'
8: The RA Pensioner
9: 'Searching for Fame and Fortune'
10: Love, Marriage, and Persecution
11: 'Everybody's Man and a Very Obliging Creature': Severn in his Roman Prime
12: Going Home
13: The Passion for Fresco
14: The Friend of Keats
15: An Interlude in Pimlico
16: British Consul
17: The New Rome
18: Keeper of the Flame
19: A Fitting Place
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The specification in this catalogue, including without limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations, and month of publication, was as accurate as possible at the time the catalogue was compiled. Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory. Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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