the times | Saturday June 11 2022 saturday review 15
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n the garden of his Chelsea house, the
painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti assem-
bled a pre-Raphaelite menagerie.
There was Punch the Pomerian puppy,
Wolf the Irish deerhound, Jessie and
Bobby the owls and assorted rabbits, dor-
mice, hedgehogs, armadillos, kangaroos,
wallabies, squirrels, peacocks, lizards, Jap-
anese salamanders and wombats. Rossetti
also bought a zebu, a “small Brahmin bull”,
because the bull’s large, dark eyes remind-
ed him of the soulful gaze of Jane Morris.
Rossetti painted her again and again. The
obituary that ran in The Times after her
death in 1914 described her as “an exquisite
embroideress” — “All the world knows the
masses of dark hair, the ivory complexion
and exquisite features, the beautiful hands
and the great grey eyes.”
Jane was the wife of Rossetti’s old friend
William Morris, the scholar, poet, artist,
printer, socialist and wallpaper impresario.
Rossetti was romantic, troubled, obsessive
and seductively chivalrous. He would
sit at Jane’s feet, offering her straw-
berries from which he had carefully
scraped off the cream. When it
came to matters of intimacy,
William, it seems, was a bit of a
wombat.
William Morris we know. The
man who launched a thousand
“Do not have anything in your
house that you do not know to be
useful or believe to be beautiful”
tea towels. I write this in a bedroom
papered (on two walls because after
that my budget ran out) with Morris’s
Willow Bough pattern. But what about
Jane? Who was this enigmatic, doubly ex-
quisite woman?
“Jane’s life,” Suzanne Fagence Cooper
writes in How We Might Live, “was just
as radical and inventive as William’s.
She was skilled, opinionated and capable
of extraordinary personal transforma-
tion.” Jane is fortunate in her biographer.
Fagence Cooper, a former curator at the
V&A and now a research fellow at the Uni-
versity of York, is a super-fan.
Through Rossetti’s portraits Jane be-
came “one of the most recognisable
women of her generation”. Yet the real
Jane, the Jane behind the painted and pho-
tographed surface, is unknown. Henry
James, on a visit to the Morrises in London
in March 1869, thought Jane like “a figure
cut out of a missal... an apparition of fear-
ful and wonderful intensity”.
William and Jane were born worlds
apart. His father was a financier; hers an
ostler or groom. He grew up at Woodford
Hall set in 50 acres of park in Epping For-
est; she in a dark, cramped house on a
narrow cut-through in Oxford. Rossetti
spotted her first, in the audience of anThe face that
fired up the
pre-Raphaelites
She was one of the most recognisable
women of her era, but who was the
real Jane Morris, asks Laura Freeman
Oxford theatre, but it was Morris whom
she married, in 1859. She was 18, he 25.
They would have two daughters: Jenny,
whose dreams of a place at Cambridge
were destroyed by epilepsy, and May, who
became an artist and embroiderer. ToJane, William was “Topsy”, while she was
his “Janey”. Cathy Madox Brown, the eld-
est daughter of the painter Ford Madox
Brown, thought it a fairytale marriage:
Jane the beauty, William the beast. Willi-
am broke chairs with his constant wrig-gling and stuck forks into tables when
roused in debate. His moods were famous.
To his old friend and artistic collaborator
Edward “Ned” Burne-Jones he wrote to
apologise: “I am like a hedgehog with nas-
tiness.” He admitted to “sulks”, “fidgets”
and the odd “fit of dumps”. Always stout, he
became positively corpulent.
He swapped the top hat, tie and stiff col-
lar of his youth for an indigo jacket and
clogs. (The hat he deliberately sat on and
squashed.) When he took up dyeing, he
went blue to the elbow. He liked to read his
poems, one of which was 13,000 lines long,
aloud after dinner. Georgie Burne-Jones,
Ned’s wife, remembered stabbing herself
with pins to keep awake. William had infi-
nite energy. His business manager com-
plained that he would “start half a dozen
jobs... but they are put away, bits get lost,
have to be done again”.
In 1869 Morris started learning Iceland-
ic. In the early 1870s he took up calligraphy
and manuscript illumination, collected
goose and crow quills to make his pens and
got to grips with gold leaf by sticking the
sheets to the page with the grease from his
hair. Morris the blunderbuss made works
of intricate beauty.
If he wasn’t protesting the brutal “resto-
ration” of ancient buildings, he was writing
utopian tracts about how the poor might
be housed. He loved books and could be
found “huggling” favourite volumes. Jane
despaired of finding space to hang a paint-
ing, “books being our chief pictures”.
Jane was tall, slender and remarkably
pale. Some remembered her as still, quiet,
cool, “a sealed book”. Others remembered
her busyness, her “long pale hands moving
deftly over some rich embroidery”, her
delight in her gardens at the Red House in
Bexleyheath, Kelmscott Manor in Ox-
fordshire and Kelmscott House in Ham-
mersmith in west London. She was devot-
ed to Jenny. She once complained to Ned
Burne-Jones of having had the “mungles”.
“Perhaps you don’t know what that is, it is
made up of grief and temper and various
aches.” From the humblest beginnings she
learnt Italian, French and the piano. She
taught herself the mandolin.
William was solicitous, but not amorous.
The ardent Rossetti must have been irre-
sistible, and Jane’s head was later turned
by the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who
Fagence Cooper calls “one of the 19th
century’s great philanderers”. Jane wrote
to Blunt to say that he was “reawakening in
me the old interest in such things which I
had long ago thought dead within me”.
Jane’s letters, Fagence Cooper writes,
are “scattered”; “there are many gaps”; we
can “try, perhaps, to build up a picture of
her world from scraps of information”; “it
is often difficult for us to follow Jane’s
movements”; “we have no record of what
Jane’s servants thought of her as they
guessed or whispered”. This is a book of
guesses and whispers. Fagence Cooper
asks many open-ended questions: “Was
Jane flattered by the approach of the two
London artists?” “How did she become so
accomplished?” “What was Jane doing
and feeling during this distressing time?”
William died in 1896 at 62; the doctor
told Jane that her husband had “done
more work than most ten men”. Jane lived
another 18 years, dying in 1914, aged 74.
The Jane of this account is kind, capable,
adept and resourceful, but she remains,
I’m afraid, second fiddle — mandolin? —
to her husband. The legend is more inter-
esting than the woman. Late in Jane’s life
she was visited by a young poet. When he
praised her quince jam, she gave him a jar.
“A jar of quince jam,” he wrote, “made by
the beautiful lady whom Morris had loved
and Rossetti had painted! It was like receiv-
ing it at the hands of Helen of Troy.”Henry James
thought Jane
was like ‘a
figure cut out
of a missal...
an apparition
of fearful and
wonderful
intensity’
painted lady From top: The Daydream by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with Jane
Morris as his sitter; Rossetti’s La donna della finestra. Above left: William MorrisHow We
Might Live
At Home with Jane
and William Morris
by Suzanne Fagence
CooperQuercus, 536pp; £30