When he died at the age of just twenty-five, few imagined John Keats would one day be considered among the greatest poets of all time.

Taking nine of Keats’s best-known poems, Lucasta Miller excavates their backstories and, in doing so, resurrects the real Keats: an outsider from a damaged family whose visceral love of language allowed him to change the face of English literature for ever.

Combining close-up readings with the story of his brief existence, Miller shows us how Keats crafted his groundbreaking poetry and explains why it continues to speak to us across the centuries.

‘One never wants Keats’s life to end so soon; I didn’t want this book to end, either’ TLS Books of the Year

‘Irresistible… [Miller]digs into the backstories of her subject’s most famous poems to uncover aspects of his life and work that challenge well-worn romantic myths’ Wall Street Journal

The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone – ‘Here lies one whose name was writ in water’ – seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of twenty-five, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets two hundred years later, though he himself had an inkling.

In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats’s best-known poems – the ones you are most likely to have read – and excavates their backstories. In doing so, she resurrects the real Keats: a lower-middle-class outsider from a tragic and dysfunctional family, whose extraordinary energy and love of language allowed him to pummel his way into the heart of English literature; a freethinker and a liberal at a time of repression; a human being who delighted in the sensation of the moment; but a complex individual, not the ethereal figure of his posthumous myth.

Combining close-up readings of his writings with the story of his brief but teeming existence, Lucasta Miller shows us how Keats made his poetry, and explains why it retains its vertiginous originality and continues to speak to us across the generations.

On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known by her initials ‘L.E.L.’

What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident? Had she committed suicide, or even been murdered?

To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the ‘female Byron’. However, she was also a woman with secrets, the mother of three illegitimate children whose existence was subsequently wiped from the record. After her death, she became the subject of a cover-up which this book unravels, excavating with it a whole lost literary culture.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE BRONTE MYTH