Chapter 7 builds on, while in some ways reversing, the analysis in Chapter 6. It examines the thirty-nine surviving letters from Keats to Fanny Brawne from the perspective of their distancing function. Keats’s often distinctly fraught and sometimes emotionally coercive letters and notes to Fanny mostly date from the summer and early autumn of 1819, when he was away from London on a writing retreat, and from February to March 1820, when he was living right next door to the Brawne family at Wentworth Place in Hampstead but was often too unwell to see her. The chapter considers Keats’s love letters as informed and even instructed by the writers he happens to be reading (especially Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Philip Massinger), arguing that what he is reading can itself distance the writer from his recipient as much as bring the two together: Keats’s epistolary intertextuality itself distances him from the object of his desire.

The book ends with a brief Postscript on not reading letters. It examines the correspondence between Keats’s friend and carer Joseph Severn and Keats’s friends back in London as the poet is dying in Rome in the winter of 1820–1. The correspondence records how, having effectively stopped writing poetry more than a year earlier, Keats is now no longer able to read, let alone write, even letters. The chapter argues that this epistolary stoppage has itself fed into the cultural reception of the life and work of a poet who has become admired, respected, and loved for his correspondence as much as for his poems.

Chapter 6 opens with a discussion of some of the letters Keats sent his brother and sister-in-law after they migrated to America in the summer of 1818. It explores the paradox that letters can at times generate a sense of intimacy not so much in spite of distance but because of it. It looks at the way in which Keats can find people ‘pressing’ on him, and even oppressive, such that he can seem to value the prosthetic sense of presence offered by a letter and the personal space it can allow a different kind of intimacy. The second half of the chapter considers letters as ‘touching’, particularly in relation to Keats’s love letters to Fanny Brawne, where he seems particularly attuned to the physical touch of a letter and the way that a letter can be emotionally ‘touching’ precisely because it is distanced, mediated, and delayed.

Keats uses the word ‘interread’ to refer to the way that a letter written to one person will also be read by another. The suggestion of interaction and intersubjectivity implied by that ‘inter’ prefix sheds light on Keats’s representations of shared reading in his poetry and letters. This chapter also considers his portrayal of women readers, especially in relation to Fanny Brawne, whose letters about reading with Keats, as well as his sister Fanny Keats, offer insight into the boundaries of privacy and sharing. Where Keats’s early poems seem eager to get inside the feeling of reading, elsewhere, his manner of picturing reading from the outside aims at a more detached form of sympathy, one which avoids intruding too far into another person’s inner experience. Shared reading subsequently comes to represent for him the possibility of connection at a distance.