[The Keats Brothers] takes a step beyond standard biographies in several ways. Most importantly, it explores the central role George played in recognizing and emotionally supporting John's genius. Publishers Weekly 20110829 [Gigante's] book, with its transatlantic sweep and epic narrative--including cameos from John James Audubon, Emerson, and more--offers a detailed study of the stunning vicissitudes of the brothers' lives. Even those familiar with the poet's timeline will see it anew through the lens of this intense sibling relationship...As she unravels the compelling story of John's and George's lives, Gigante easily overturns stereotypes about academics churning out dry prose. She has the descriptive power of a novelist or poet...The Keats Brothers is a major accomplishment, one that will surely influence biographies of Keats yet to come. -- Carmela Ciuraru Barnes & Noble Review 20111017 Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way...The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery...Gigante memorably contrasts these imaginary worlds with the slovenly wilderness and grimy inhabitants that George and Georgiana witnessed as they traveled by barge and wagon into the interior...The book ends splendidly...with the apparition of Oscar Wilde, long after George's death by tuberculosis in 1841, lecturing on John Keats, the real Adonis of our age, to the people of Louisville in 1882, and admiring Keats's manuscripts in the hands of his niece, Emma. -- Christopher Benfey New York Times Book Review 20111016 [Gigante's] book, with its transatlantic sweep and epic narrative--including cameos from John James Audubon, Emerson, and more--offers a detailed study of the stunning vicissitudes of the brothers' lives. Even those familiar with the poet's timeline will see it anew through the lens of this intense sibling relationship...As she unravels the compelling story of John's and George's lives, Gigante easily overturns stereotypes about academics churning out dry prose. She has the descriptive power of a novelist or poet...The Keats Brothers is a major accomplishment, one that will surely influence biographies of Keats yet to come. -- Carmela Ciuraru Barnes & Noble Review 20111017 Gigante has had the clever idea of telling the stories of John and George as parallel lives, a dual biography of brothers. Of course, no single achievement of George's matches John's in any imaginable way...The challenge for Gigante is to give sufficiently rich detail concerning George's travels in America to outweigh the conspicuous achievement gap between the two brothers. Mostly, she succeeds brilliantly. The American wilderness, she points out, had long appealed to English poets, as a land of utopian social possibility and sublime natural imagery...Gigante memorably contrasts these imaginary worlds with the slovenly wilderness and grimy inhabitants that George and Georgiana witnessed as they traveled by barge and wagon into the interior...The book ends splendidly...with the apparition of Oscar Wilde, long after George's death by tuberculosis in 1841, lecturing on John Keats, the real Adonis of our age, to the people of Louisville in 1882, and admiring Keats's manuscripts in the hands of his niece, Emma. -- Christopher Benfey New York Times Book Review 20111016 There have been plenty of good biographies of Keats but Denise Gigante has had the bright idea of writing a dual biography intertwining the sad history of John with the much less well-known story of his brother George...Gigante examines their sometimes strained fraternal intimacy in this resourceful and engaging book...Some of the most gripping pages in this lively and consistently interesting book are not about poetry at all, but rather recreate the adventures of the George Keatses across America, through Ohio to Cincinnati and on to Louisville. Gigante portrays very well the sheer discomfort of it all, the whiskey-soaked world of the steamboats, the reckless and chaotic entrepreneurialism and the accompanying ecological horrors of forest-clearing--out of which George did very nicely thank you...Gigante chooses to tell the story of Keats's last months by flipping to and fro between George in America and John, first in London and then in Italy, failing in the grip of his appalling disease, with no religion to support him (as Joseph Severn, his companion in the last weeks, said). This decision gives the book a meanwhile back at the ranch quality which is nothing but a pleasure, and creates some sad contrasts that Gigante is too well mannered to labor...The decision to tell their lives in parallel does make a kind of sense, and Denise Gigante has done it with much style. -- Seamus Perry Literary Review 20111101 We not only learn a lot about George, who invariably and inevitably plays only a minor role in biographies of his brother--but as the lives illuminate each other, new light is shed upon material that we thought we knew already...Why is The Keats Brothers such a terrific read? What is the secret of this stunning achievement, and what makes this book so unputdownable?...The first is that [Gigante] is a hell of a storyteller. Departing from Plutarch's model, Gigante adroitly alternates between John's life and George's, counterpointing the one with the other, drawing out parallels and contrasts with an ease that can inspire only admiration...The second reason is that Gigante possesses imagination to an uncommon degree. And what is a biography without imagination, empathy and judgement? The opening pages alone (set in Margate in 1816) and the epilogue (Oscar Wilde visiting Louisville, Kentucky, in 1882) are dazzling gems of inspired life writing--but there are many, many more such passages...Gigante has that eye for the telling detail that only the born storyteller has--and, pace Plutarch, she gives us both lives and history: her vignettes of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, of New York and Louisville are first-rate history made alive--they open up a new world, and the New World, to Keats scholars. In a way different from William Wordsworth, John Keats knew how to make poetry out of loss. In Denise Gigante he has found a congenial biographer, writing as she does about what remains, even if there is all ocean between. -- Christopher Bode Times Higher Education 20111110 In The Keats Brothers, Denise Gigante has crafted a detailed, fast-moving life of this strong-minded poet and the siblings who helped sustain him...Out of primary documents she reanimates a major poet and his world, and crafts a transatlantic adventure story with a novelist's gift for moving narrative along. In brief, Gigante convincingly demonstrates that George Keats, the poet's junior by sixteen months, served as John's muse. -- Patrick Kurp Quarterly Conversation 20111205 A bold, expressive style makes this an engaging narrative throughout. The love, misunderstanding, and rivalry between a spiritual adventurer and a worldly one are emblematic of contrasts in 19th-century British culture. -- R. K. Mookerjee Choice 20120301 What makes Gigante's approach different...is her determination to weave the life of the poet back into the family woof, to see the Keats siblings John, George, Tom, and Fanny as their own most relevant personal and social unit, unmoored and isolated from society as they were by the early deaths of their parents...It is George's life that generates everything that is rich and strange about the biography, and there is much to relish in Gigante's extensively researched and detailed account of the American republic during the early decades of the nineteenth century. -- William Christie Australian Book Review 20120401
