Review of a talk by Alessandro Gallenzi at the Oxford Literary Festival
by Lynn Shepherd
“Why would we need another biography of Keats?”
This was the question posed at the start of today’s talk by Alessandro Gallenzi, as part of the Oxford Literary Festival. Gallenzi has, of course, produced just such a book, Written in Water: John Keats’s Final Journey. So why did he decide to write it? The answer, as he went on to tell us, is because until now, all Keats biographies have been based on an unreliable source.
That source is the 1892 biography of Joseph Severn by William Sharp, mystic, all-round ambitious man of letters, biographer of Shelley, Rossetti and Heine, among others, and frustrated poet (Rossetti made the fatal mistake of telling Sharp his poems had the same promise as those of Keats).
William Sharp
Joseph Severn was, of course, the painter friend who accompanied Keats on his final journey, sailing with him on the Maria Crowther from London to Naples, and on to Rome, where he tended him in his final, terrible weeks.
Severn’s sketch of the Maria Crowther
Severn has been as much criticised as lionised in the two centuries since Keats’s death, but it’s safe to say William Sharp’s account sits firmly in the latter camp. And no wonder, he was commissioned to write it by Severn’s son, Walter, who provided him with a wealth of his father’s papers, letters and memoirs, much of it unpublished at the time.
Sharp took on the task with alacrity, and it rapidly became a vehicle for his own passionate enthusiasm for Keats. Chapters III and IV of the published work have been a crucial source for Keats scholars and biographers ever since. There’s just one problem: Sharp made it up. Not all of it clearly, but there were numerous pages missing in the source material, most notably in the autobiographical papers. And where Sharp encountered a gap, he was happy to fill it. And he was a dab hand at a pastiche. As a result, some key sections of Sharp’s account, especially relating to Keats’s final journey, are entirely fictional. Sharp even called the book ‘the Severn novel’.
None of this was known until 2005, when Grant F. Scott published definitive versions of the Severn manuscripts, correcting Sharp’s adaptations and additions. Alessandro Gallenzi’s new biography of Keats draws on this newly corrected material, and also benefits from new discoveries of his own, made in the Italian archives. The story he tells differs both subtly and in more significant ways from what he calls the ‘canonical’ version of Keats’s last journey, one which is less romanticised and less picturesque. It sounds like a fascinating read, but I’m sure I can’t be the only member of the audience who came away fascinated by William Sharp.
His ambition to become a famous writer was finally fulfilled, though in a rather unexpected and (for him) awkward fashion. Apparently he had always wanted to explore the feminine side of his personality, and started writing novels under the pseudonym Fiona MacLeod. Long since forgotten, the MacLeod novels were a sensation in the 1890s, and Sharp was forced to live an uncomfortable double life as both a literary man about town and a famous female novelist. Inundated with fan mail, he got his sister to write back to his admirers (including the likes of WB Yeats) to ensure the letters were written in a recognisably ‘feminine’ hand. It wasn’t until after his premature death at the age of 50, that the real identity of ‘Fiona MacLeod’ was finally revealed.
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