Screening of Bright Star introduction by David Pendleton and Heather Cole.

Transcript

For more interviews and talks, visit the Harvard Film Archive Visiting Artists Collection page.

David Pendleton  0:03 

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'm David Pendleton from the Harvard Film Archive. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you all to this very special screening of Bright Star this evening. I beg your forbearance, I've got a little bit of hay fever or something. So I'm a little hoarse and runny-nosed, but I won't be up here long, so you won't have to suffer through too much. 

I’ve got two important things to say. The first important thing to say is to ask you to turn off any device that you have that might make noise or shed light, and please make sure it remains extinguished while the house lights are down, for the pleasure and concentration of those watching the film along with you. 

Tonight's screening marks the midpoint of a collaboration between the Harvard Film Archive and Harvard's Houghton Library, entitled Houghton at 75. Films Inspired by Harvard Library’s Special Collections. We at the Harvard Film Archive are indeed part of the Harvard Library. And in this series, we are pleased to foreground another very special part of the Library to celebrate the 75th anniversary of its founding. In fact, there's a number of commemorative events for this anniversary, for Houghton Library, and you can find them listed at houghton75.org. In fact, as I've said before, Houghton Library is not just a special collection. It’s a collection of special collections. The main building is just across Quincy Street in Harvard Yard, between Widener and Lamont libraries, and it is Harvard's primary rare book and special collections library, which means it's a leading destination for researchers of all kinds. 

For this celebration, we've selected five films related to the special collections at Houghton in a variety of ways. Previously, we had screenings of The Miracle Worker, to highlight the collection of the papers of writer William Gibson, followed by a screening of the new Emily Dickinson biopic, A Quiet Passion, in conjunction with the Emily Dickinson Collection at Houghton. And tonight we'll be watching Bright Star, the beautiful 2009 film by contemporary Australian filmmaker Jane Campion about the relationship between John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Each screening has been or will be introduced by a librarian or curator at Houghton, to say more about the collection related to each film and explain what that relationship is in each case. And this is the second important thing that I have to say tonight, that we're honored by the presence of Heather Cole, Assistant Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, and also the Curator of Houghton’s Theodore Roosevelt Collection, although I think she'll be talking more in the capacity of the former rather than the latter, I imagine, about John Keats. She’ll say a bit more about the links between the film and Houghton's holdings. I'd like to conclude by saying thank you to our colleagues at Houghton, who helped organize this series, on behalf of all of us at the Archive. Tom Hyry, who, as Harvard's Florence Fearrington Librarian, is the head of Houghton Library; Dennis Marnon, who is Houghton's Administrative Officer; and Anne-Marie Eze, the Director of Scholarly and Public Programs at Houghton. So please welcome Heather Cole to the podium, as well as Dennis Marnon and Anne-Marie Eze, who are here, with a round of applause.

[APPLAUSE]

Heather Cole  3:26 

Thank you, David. And good evening. 

On July 25, 1819, twenty-three-year-old John Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne from the Isle of Wight, “You cannot conceive how I ache to be with you, how I would die for one hour. Forgive me if I wander a little this evening, for I have been all day employed in a very abstract poem, and I am in deep love with you. Two things which must excuse me. I have, believe me, not been an age in letting you take possession of me. The very first week I knew you, I wrote myself your vassal. If you should ever feel for a man at the first sight what I did for you, I am lost. All I can bring you is a swooning admiration of your beauty.” Now that's how you write a love letter.

[MURMUR OF LAUGHTER]

Of the nearly forty surviving letters that Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, thirteen—including the one from which I just quoted—now reside in Houghton Library’s Keats collection. So how did these most private of letters, along with many of Keats's poetry manuscripts and other materials, travel from Regency Hampstead to Cambridge, Massachusetts? The trail of course begins with Keats himself. Keats was born in 1795, the eldest of four surviving children of middle-class parents. Initially, he pursued a career as an apothecary. Following his parents’ deaths, he began an apprenticeship at the age of fourteen, and entered medical school at Guy's Hospital in London at the age of twenty, where he assisted surgeons during operations. A year later, he received his apothecary license, seemingly ensuring financial security for himself and any dependents. But Keats was increasingly encouraged by literary mentors and his own interest to abandon a career in medicine for one as a poet. He pursued that career diligently, if not entirely successfully. 

Despite being hailed by prominent friends as a representative of a new school of poetry, his first book of poems, published in 1816, was a critical failure. Keats kept at it, and after a tour of Scotland with his friend Charles Brown, Keats returned to London to nurse his brother Tom, who was dying of tuberculosis. It was while visiting Brown at Wentworth Place, the house in Hampstead of which Brown rented half to a Mrs. Brawne and her three children, that Keats first encountered Fanny Brawne. In a letter to his brother George in the autumn of 1818, Keats wrote, quote, “Mrs. Brawne still resides in Hampstead. Her daughter senior is, I think, beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange. We have a little tiff now and then,” unquote. Keats moved into the other half of the house himself several months later, and as we'll see in Bright Star, developed a passionate relationship with Fanny Brawne. I don't want to give too much of it away, and also, I think Jane Campion does a beautiful job in the film of telling the story from Fanny's perspective. 

So I'm gonna skip ahead forty years to the 1870s. After her death, Fanny's children discovered a trove of letters to her from John Keats, who after his death in 1821, had become a celebrated poet. Fanny's husband, Louis Lindo, never knew of his wife's connection to Keats, and their children were surprised to discover it. Scholars and readers were aware Keats had formed an attachment to a young woman, but her identity was unknown. Fanny's children agreed to the publication of the letters, which caused an uproar among Victorian readers. Fanny Brawne was attacked for, as they saw it, distracting Keats from his work, and for seeming to flirt with other men and keep Keats dangling, uncertain of her affections. One Victorian critic wrote, quote, “Most of us are soberly thankful that Keats escaped from his own heart's desire and his worst impending peril, Mrs. Keats,” unquote. Despite this maligned reputation, the sale of Keats's letters to Fanny Brawne in 1885 created quite a stir. Oscar Wilde even composed a sonnet about it, in which he commented: “Ay! For each separate pulse of passion quote/The merchant’s price. I think they love not art/Who break the crystal of a poet’s heart/That small and sickly eyes may glare and gloat.”

So yes, while bidding on a writer's private correspondence might seem greedy and exploitative—sorry to break this to you, Oscar Wilde, but your papers now get the same treatment!—it is because of those buyers and collectors that we are able to see and to study those materials in libraries like Houghton. 

The Keats Collection has come to Harvard almost entirely through gifts from donors. The first Keats manuscripts to arrive at Harvard came in 1915 as part of a large gift of autographs collected by the Boston publisher and editor, James T. Fields. These included just a fragment of the poems “I stood tiptoe upon a little hill,” and “Otho.” These fragments were created soon after Keats's death by his friends who cut up some of his manuscripts for distribution to admirers. So while a few gifts, like those from Fields, arrived at Harvard in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Harvard was not really a destination for rare books and manuscripts. 

One of the first large gifts to put Harvard on the map was the collection of Amy Lowell. Lowell, the sister of Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell and astronomer Percival Lowell, and a member of the prominent Boston Brahmin family, grew up an avid reader. She discovered Keats at age fifteen and was, like many of his readers, immediately captivated. As an adult, Lowell became a rather successful poet and editor herself, and used her considerable resources to collect manuscripts and books of English and American writers. Her collection included tiny manuscript booklets compiled by the Bronte siblings as teenagers; a large group of Tennyson's manuscript notebooks in which he drafted many of his most well-known poems; letters and first editions of Jane Austen, and much more. Lowell bequeathed her collection to Harvard in 1925, and it lived on the top floor of Widener Library until Houghton was built in 1942. So Lowell began collecting Keats manuscripts in 1902, when she acquired a letter from Keats to Fanny Brawne. She would go on building her collection until she could claim, in 1924, that “As far as I can make out, I have one of the largest, if not the largest, collection of Keats material now in existence.” 

But Lowell wasn't interested in just collecting Keats. Over time, she became a well-known Keats expert. She strongly disagreed with how Keats's Victorian biographers had mistreated Fanny Brawne. Lowell set out to write a new biography of Keats, redeeming Brawne’s reputation in the process. As we'll see, she was quite successful. Bright Star is a direct product of that reparation. 

The only other private collection that could claim to rival Lowell's was owned by Arthur Houghton. Arthur Houghton began collecting Keats material soon after graduating from Harvard in 1929. A decade later, he would provide the funding and a name for a standalone library to house Harvard's rare books and manuscripts. Arthur Houghton made numerous gifts of his Keats collection to Houghton Library over the course of thirty years. His collection includes correspondence between Keats and his friend Benjamin Robert Hayden, the papers of Keats’s sister, Fanny Keats Llanos; and manuscript drafts and fragments of eighteen poems; as well as Commonplace Books, the sole authority for some of Keats's texts; editions of Keats's poems presented to members of his circle; and books that belonged to Keats, including a set of Shakespeare. 

Now, thanks mainly to Arthur Houghton and Amy Lowell, Houghton Library has the world's largest collection of Keats material. Of the 126 surviving poetry manuscripts in Keats’s hand, Houghton holds ninety-one, almost three-quarters of his surviving poetry. Of 251 surviving letters, Houghton holds eighty-six in his hand, and another twenty-four transcripts that did not survive in the original. You, as members of the public, can see the collection in two ways. When Houghton Library was built, Arthur Houghton commissioned a Keats Room on the library’s second floor to house and display the collection. Visitors can view the room and see a rotating selection of Keats's original manuscripts on our free public tour, held every Friday at 2 p.m. In addition, everything in our collection in Keats's hand has been digitized and can be viewed online through our website. My colleagues and I are always happy to answer questions and help you navigate our resources. 

Keats's tombstone on his grave in Rome reads, per the poet's instructions, “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.” We are lucky enough here at Harvard to be able to preserve Keats's work much more solidly than that. Thank you, and enjoy the film!

[APPLAUSE]

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