Jane Morris: The Burden of History 9780748681921

Citation preview

Jane Morris

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd i

18/03/2013 15:50

Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Volumes available in the series: In Lady Audley’s Shadow: Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Victorian Literary Genres Saverio Tomaiuolo 978 0 7486 4115 4 Hbk

Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy Kate Hext 978 0 7486 4625 8 Hbk

Blasted Literature: Victorian Political Fiction and the Shock of Modernism Deaglán Ó Donghaile 978 0 7486 4067 6 Hbk

London’s Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840–1915 Haewon Hwang 978 0 7486 7607 1 Hbk

William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880–1914 Anna Vaninskaya 978 0 7486 4149 9 Hbk 1895: Drama, Disaster and Disgrace in Late Victorian Britain Nicholas Freeman 978 0 7486 4056 0 Hbk Determined Spirits: Eugenics, Heredity and Racial Regeneration in AngloAmerican Spiritualist Writing, 1848–1930 Christine Ferguson 978 0 7486 3965 6 Hbk

Thomas Hardy’s Legal Fictions Trish Ferguson 978 0 7486 7324 7 Hbk Jane Morris: The Burden of History Wendy Parkins 978 0 7486 4127 7 Hbk Moving Images: Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices Helen Groth 978 0 7486 6948 6 Hbk Forthcoming volumes:

Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Phenomenal Urban Multiplicity Julian Wolfreys 978 0 7486 4040 9 Hbk

Her Father’s Name: Gender, Theatricality and Spiritualism in Florence Marryat’s Fiction Tatiana Kontou 978 0 7486 4007 2 Hbk

Re-Imagining the ‘Dark Continent’ in fin de siècle Literature Robbie McLaughlan 978 0 7486 4715 6 Hbk

British India and Victorian Culture Máire ni Fhlathúin 978 0 7486 4068 3 Hbk

Roomscape: Women Readers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf Susan David Bernstein 978 0 7486 4065 2 Hbk

Women and the Railway, 1850–1915 Anna Despotopoulou 978 0 7486 7694 1 Hbk

Visit the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture web page at www. euppublishing.com/series/ecve Also Available: Victoriographies – A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing, 1790–1914, edited by Julian Wolfreys. ISSN: 2044-2416 www.eupjournals.com/vic

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd ii

18/03/2013 15:50

Jane Morris The Burden of History

Wendy Parkins

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd iii

18/03/2013 15:50

© Wendy Parkins, 2013 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LF www.euppublishing.com Typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 0 7486 4127 7 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 7486 8192 1 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 0 7486 8193 8 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7486 8194 5 (Amazon ebook) The right of Wendy Parkins to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd iv

18/03/2013 15:50

Contents

Illustrations Series Editor’s Preface Acknowledgements Preface Chronology

vi vii ix xi xx

Introduction: Life and Letters ‘Is it not too daring and altogether too inexplicable?’: Gossip, Anecdote and Biography Suet and Strawberries: Life Writing and Habitus 1. Scandal ‘The lady I spoke about’: Jane and Gabriel ‘In thy shut lips what secrets!’: Jane and Wilfrid 2. Silence ‘What more can I say’: The Reticence of Jane Morris ‘Dear suffering Janey’: The Myth of Invalidism 3. Class Social Mobility and ‘rather sad lives’ Politics and ‘Socialism on the brain’ 4. Icon Wonder: ‘She haunts me still’ Celebrity: The Style of ‘the famous Mrs. Morris’ 5. Home ‘So much love dearest’: Jane Morris at Home Si je puis: Jane Morris’s Creative Agency Conclusion

3 11 21 24 41 57 58 65 83 85 99 113 117 123 143 145 162 177

Bibliography Index

183 195

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd v

1

18/03/2013 15:50

Illustrations

Figure 1. Jane Morris, photographed by John Parsons, 1865 (DGRC). Figure 2. Jane Morris, photographed by John Parsons, 1865 (DGRC). Figure 3. ‘Frustrated Social Ambition’, Punch, George du Maurier (V&A). Figure 4. ‘Six Mark Teapot’, Punch, George du Maurier (V&A). Figure 5. ‘Daisy’ wall hangings, now at Kelmscott Manor (Society of Antiquaries). Figure 6. Jane Morris’s booklet, a gift to Rosalind Howard (Castle Howard Archives). Figure 7. Coverlet for William Morris’s bed embroidered by Jane Morris and Mary de Morgan, Kelmscott Manor (Society of Antiquaries). Figure 8. Detail, Kelmscott bed coverlet (Society of Antiquaries). Figure 9. ‘Si je puis. Jane Morris. Kelmscott.’ Detail, Kelmscott bed coverlet (Society of Antiquaries).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd vi

115 121 136 137 150 164

167 168 169

18/03/2013 15:50

Series Editor’s Preface

‘Victorian’ is a term, at once indicative of a strongly determined concept and an often notoriously vague notion, emptied of all meaningful content by the many journalistic misconceptions that persist about the inhabitants and cultures of the British Isles and Victoria’s Empire in the nineteenth century. As such, it has become a by-word for the assumption of various, often contradictory habits of thought, belief, behaviour and perceptions. Victorian studies and studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture have, from their institutional inception, questioned narrowness of presumption, pushed at the limits of the nominal definition, and have sought to question the very grounds on which the unreflective perception of the so-called Victorian has been built; and so they continue to do. Victorian and nineteenth-century studies of literature and culture maintain a breadth and diversity of interest, of focus and inquiry, in an interrogative and intellectually open-minded and challenging manner, which are equal to the exploration and inquisitiveness of its subjects. Many of the questions asked by scholars and researchers of the innumerable productions of nineteenth-century society actively put into suspension the clichés and stereotypes of ‘Victorianism’, whether the approach has been sustained by historical, scientific, philosophical, empirical, ideological or theoretical concerns; indeed, it would be incorrect to assume that each of these approaches to the idea of the Victorian has been, or has remained, in the main exclusive, sealed off from the interests and engagements of other approaches. A vital interdisciplinarity has been pursued and embraced, for the most part, even as there has been contest and debate amongst Victorianists, pursued with as much fervour as the affirmative exploration between different disciplines and differing epistemologies put to work in the service of reading the nineteenth century. Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture aims to take up both the debates and the inventive approaches and departures from

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd vii

18/03/2013 15:50

viii

Jane Morris

convention that studies in the nineteenth century have witnessed for the last half century at least. Aiming to maintain a ‘Victorian’ (in the most positive sense of that motif) spirit of inquiry, the series’ purpose is to continue and augment the cross-fertilisation of interdisciplinary approaches, and to offer, in addition, a number of timely and untimely revisions of Victorian literature, culture, history and identity. At the same time, the series will ask questions concerning what has been missed or improperly received, misread, or not read at all, in order to present a multi-faceted and heterogeneous kaleidoscope of representations. Drawing on the most provocative, thoughtful and original research, the series will seek to prod at the notion of the ‘Victorian’, and in so doing, principally through theoretically and epistemologically sophisticated close readings of the historicity of literature and culture in the nineteenth century, to offer the reader provocative insights into a world that is at once overly familiar, and irreducibly different, other and strange. Working from original sources, primary documents and recent interdisciplinary theoretical models, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture seeks not simply to push at the boundaries of research in the nineteenth century, but also to inaugurate the persistent erasure and provisional, strategic redrawing of those borders. Julian Wolfreys

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd viii

18/03/2013 15:50

Acknowledgements

This book was primarily written and researched in New Zealand – far from the primary sources of text and image on which it relies. I am therefore heavily indebted to the librarians, researchers and curators around the world who have responded (either in person or by email) to my many requests for documents, books, images, information and permissions over the past few years with a courtesy that has at times been touching. In particular, I would like to thank Mark Samuels Lasner (University of Delaware Library), Anna-Louise Mason (Castle Howard Archives), Julia Dudkiewicz (Society of Antiquaries), Sarah Romkey (University of British Columbia Archives), Susan Halpert (Houghton Library), Paula Hasler (University of Otago), Charles Greene (Princeton University Library), as well as the staff at the Fitzwilliam Museum Archives, the National Art Library (Victoria & Albert Museum), the British Library, the National Portrait Gallery, and the West Sussex County Archives. The Series Editor, Julian Wolfreys, has been unstinting in his support and enthusiasm for this project and I hope that the finished product repays his encouragement, even if I fear it is no match for the wit and style of his many emails that have kept me going over the past couple of years. Other treasured sources of encouragement and support – which has taken many forms from reading draft chapters to providing collegial solace or pep-talks over a cup of tea or something stronger – included Rachel Bowlby, Melisssa Buron, Angela Dunstan, David Ellison, Holly Furneaux, Helen Groth, Mark Seymour, Lyn Tribble and Ana Vadillo. Sally Ledger was an inspiring and supportive voice at the outset of this project and is still sorely missed. Invaluable opportunities to think through some of the ideas expressed here were provided by research seminars at the University of Otago English Department and the Victorian Studies Centre at the University of Leicester, and conferences at the University of Montpellier in 2011

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd ix

18/03/2013 15:50

x

Jane Morris

(organised by Catherine Delyfer and Bénédicte Coste), the University of Giessen (organised by Ingo Berensmeyer), and at Sheffield University in 2012 (organised by Anna Barton). I am also grateful to the University of Otago for the funding support that enabled travel to archival sources and provided research assistance from Megan Kitching and Lisa Marr at different stages of this project. An earlier version of Chapter 2, section II, first appeared in NineteenthCentury Gender Studies, 4.2 (2008) as ‘Jane Morris’s Invalidism Reconsidered’; material from Chapter 3, section I, is reprinted with permission from REAL: Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, 28 (2012) where it appeared as ‘Social Mobility and Female Agency: The Case of Jane Morris’; and some material from Chapter 5 is extracted from Journal of Victorian Culture, 15.1 (2010), where it appeared as ‘Feeling at Home: Gender and Creative Agency at Red House’. I am grateful to the editors for allowing me to reprint this work in a revised and expanded form here. Jenni Harman first introduced me to the Pre-Raphaelites many years ago when we were undergraduates together, for which I remain extremely grateful. Most of all, however, I want to acknowledge the unstinting support and love of Geoff Craig and our children, Maddy Parkins-Craig and Gabriel Parkins-Craig, who have endured my research absences and obsessions without complaint and who must all be very glad another book is out of the way.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd x

18/03/2013 15:50

Preface

Why does Janie Morris suddenly disappear from Mackail’s ‘William Morris’ and Georgie Burne-Jones’ ‘Memorial’? Was there some scandal to be hushed up, or what? Or is it that they just get bored with her as a character? Richard Aldington (11 March 1948, HD)

In a sense, Jane Burden has no history: as a working-class woman, she appears on stage, as it were, with the anecdote of her ‘discovery’ in an Oxford theatre audience in 1857, called into being by the desiring gaze of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ever seeking a new ‘stunner’ to embody his aesthetic vision (see Burne-Jones 1904: 168). Soon after this event, she was re-made, re-created: through her marriage to William Morris in 1859 she became Jane Morris, a process that – like the legal concept of coverture – effectively erased her former identity as she was transformed from a working-class woman into a middle-class wife. In another sense, however, Jane Morris has been burdened by a resilient stereotype attached to her name – the unfaithful wife, the melancholy invalid, the iconic siren – a limited characterisation that, as Richard Aldington suggested, has evoked insufficient curiosity in the ‘Pre-Raff’ biographical tradition.1 The allusion to her family name – Burden – in the title of this book is intended to signal that, like the refrain in a song, the stories told of Jane Morris have typically involved repetitions, simplistic and persistent, that reiterate an always-already known tale of femininity (desire, betrayal, misery). By incorporating her (lost) name in this book’s title I also register from the outset the difficulties of interpretation surrounding the signifier ‘Jane Morris’. It is not simply a problem of interpretation, of decoding signifieds, because the signifier itself presents its own problem: should I refer to my subject as Jane Morris, Jane Burden Morris, Jane, or Janey? To refer to her as ‘Morris’ is often to risk confusion with her husband and yet to denote her as ‘Jane’ seems overly-familiar and complicit with a dubious biographical tradition in which women are referred to by their

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xi

18/03/2013 15:50

xii

Jane Morris

first name and men by their last.2 Naming was in fact a recurring issue in her lifetime. At her wedding, the clergyman erroneously pronounced the happy couple ‘William and Mary’ Morris (Burne-Jones 1904: 194); William Bell Scott, Rossetti’s close friend, referred to her in letters as ‘Jeanie’ (e.g. PP, 26 January 1868); intimate contemporaries called her ‘Janey’ (a name she rarely uses of herself in letters); but her lover, Wilfrid Blunt, claimed that he never called her anything but ‘Mrs Morris’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 118). Nor was the problem of naming confined to Jane Burden Morris among Pre-Raphaelite women: Elizabeth Siddall, rarely called Elizabeth Rossetti in biography and art history, is commonly referred to by the diminutive ‘Lizzie’ and the variant spellings of her family name have been much debated.3 I have opted to use ‘Jane Morris’ in the main, although at times I will also use ‘Jane’ (but never ‘Janey’) to avoid unnecessary repetition or confusion with other members of the Morris family. I will also sometimes refer to Morris and Rossetti by their given names, both for purposes of clarity and to draw attention to the unfamiliarity of such usage. The problem of naming goes to the heart of this examination of textual representations of Jane Morris, a project that invokes what Jacques Ranciére has called the ‘double absence’ on which written history depends: the ‘absence of the thing itself that is no longer there – that is in the past; and that never was – because it never was such as it was told’ (1994: 63, original emphasis). Whether in biography, memoir, anecdote or gossip, the historical Jane Morris seems to recede from view even as she is constructed through a consistent set of traits (exotic, tragic, silent, regal) that, like Rossetti’s haunting canvases of her, render her a recognisable presence even today as a Pre-Raphaelite icon who embodies a mysteriously compelling Victorian sexuality. As a study of textual depictions, this project is indebted to Catherine Belsey’s delineation of cultural history as a history of representation which ‘interprets the residues of the past explicitly from the present . . . It takes for granted that we make history, which is to say that we make a story which differs from the one contemporaries would have made’ (1999: 9, original emphasis). Belsey’s insistence that cultural history aims ‘neither [for] a recovery of the past nor an affirmation of the present, but an acknowledgement of the gap that divides them from each other’ (1999: 12) underpins this study of Jane Morris. On the one hand, I uncover historical continuities in signifying practices that have rendered Jane Morris explicable within familiar categories or tropes of femininity (such as the femme fatale or the melancholy invalid). On the other, I return to historical sources to interpret them anew using the resources of recent scholarship in history, literary theory and gender studies. Critically engaging with a range of

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xii

18/03/2013 15:50

Preface

xiii

scholars who have foregrounded the significance of class and gender in subject formation – from Pierre Bourdieu to Carolyn Steedman – my aim is not so much to dismantle the myth of Jane Morris as to offer a re-interpretation that insists on a more complex picture, one that does not always resolve contradictions or inconsistencies. In seeking to tell a different story about Jane Morris, I begin from the assumption that human subjectivity – whether represented in texts or that other form of mediated experience we call real life – is neither simple, transparent, nor unconflicted. This approach has at times meant returning to concepts that are no longer as fashionable in scholarly circles as they once were. My usage of the term ‘myth’, for instance, harks back to the work of Roland Barthes who, in Mythologies (1970, first published 1957) demonstrated the ways in which texts, both visual and verbal, present culturally and historically specific phenomena as timeless, universal or natural. Barthes described myth as ‘impoverished’ (1970: 127), meaning not that a myth cannot be richly imagined or depicted but that its meaning is always-already complete (woman as bewitching or dissembling, for instance). Myth tells and re-tells what is already known – what Barthes calls the ‘falsely obvious’ – but, paradoxically, is none the less engaging or compelling for doing so. Barthes’ famous interpretation of a photograph of an Algerian soldier saluting the French flag can be readily transposed to the myth of Jane Morris. Like the black soldier in the photograph, Jane Morris – whether in textual description or visual image – ‘has too much presence, [s]he appears as a rich, fully experienced, spontaneous, innocent, indisputable image. But at the same time this presence is tamed, put at a distance’ (Barthes 1970: 128, original emphasis). The power of such an image, Barthes insists, is that it becomes ‘almost transparent’, in the sense that it ‘becomes the accomplice of a concept which comes to it fully armed’ (1970: 128). Frequently described as a wonder, combining exotic attributes of style and physiognomy, Jane Morris nonetheless often became a figure who could be spoken for, who the observer feels entitled to interpret with authority. For Barthes, the image of the Algerian soldier embodied a myth of French patriotism that suppressed a history of violent imperialism. Similarly, representations of Jane Morris can mobilise culturallyspecific ideas about gender and class, not in spite of the detail and specificity of the image but because of it. The oft-repeated accounts of meeting Jane Morris offered by Henry James (she was ‘A figure cut out of a missal’; Lubbock 1920: 17) or George Bernard Shaw (she ‘look[ed] . . . as if she had walked out of an Egyptian tomb at Luxor’; 1936: xxiv) exemplify this signifying manoeuvre. By their own admission, these authors brought to their first encounter with Jane Morris a full

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xiii

18/03/2013 15:50

xiv

Jane Morris

armoury (to continue Barthes’ metaphor) of imagery and associations through which they interpreted her as a living, if passive, tableau rather than an embodied historical subject. In this book, I will ask what such representations signified that needed repeating so insistently? What did these mythic renderings of Jane Morris present as natural or timeless that were in fact contingent or historically specific? And what did such accounts simply disguise, occlude or omit? The myth of Jane Morris, I argue, removes her from history – its specificities, ambiguities and vicissitudes – and belies the complexities, ambivalences and lacunae of subjectivity and its key determinants: class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity. Instead, the burden of history, denoting the traces of a material existence that is no longer there, ‘evaporates’, as Barthes puts it, and is replaced by the ‘frozen speech’ of myth (1970: 127): an immutable image endowed with essential characteristics. Such mythic depictions mobilise a ‘paradigm of traits’ (Chatman 1978: 126) that has become wedded to the signifier ‘Jane Morris’ in scholarly and biographical accounts. Ostensibly derived from Victorian sources, these traits often reflect a rather simplistic interpretation of the same handful of anecdotes that have been re-told from the nineteenth to the twentyfirst centuries: the silent lady on the sofa, the woman more medieval than modern, the femme fatale who was Rossetti’s undoing. In his account of characterisation in realist narrative fiction, Seymour Chatman argued that literary characters are comprised of a ‘paradigm of traits’ that persist over the whole or part of the story, endowing characters with a sense of individuality and verisimilitude and distinguishing them from others in the narrative. Characters may be assigned a single trait (‘flat’ characters) or possess a variety of traits (‘rounded’ characters) but the repetition of traits over the course of a narrative is an important means by which a consistency and coherence of character is indicated (1978: 132). As Steven Cohan and Linda Shires point out in glossing Chatman’s theory, such traiting is not based on ‘the psychological individuality or essence of a given character’s “human nature”’ (1988: 73). Rather, ‘traits cite a historical culture’s assumptions of what qualities are recognizable as “human nature”’ and hence, ‘In any narrative, . . . the traiting of character draws upon historically different frames of reference which a culture uses to construct notions of identity’ (Cohan and Shires 1988: 73, emphasis added). The paradigm of traits attributed to a historical figure in biographical representations can work in a similar way and, like myth, naturalises certain assumptions about that figure derived from culturally prevalent beliefs and values. In a circular process, such characters are recognised as life-like because they embody culturally recognisable traits and, in

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xiv

18/03/2013 15:50

Preface

xv

turn, these traits seem to be an enduring aspect of human nature through their presence in accounts of historical figures. Traits or characteristics are thus understood as essential qualities, rather than a device by which narratives – whether fictional or biographical – distinguish ‘one character from another relationally’ (Cohan and Shires 1988: 75). Take as an example the quality of silence so often attributed to Jane Morris, presented as an enduring characteristic that went a considerable way in explaining her character (‘the silentest woman I have ever known’, Shaw claimed; 1936: xxiv). Understood as one trait within a paradigm assembled under the name Jane Morris, silence could instead be understood as serving a narrative purpose to distinguish her character from others. Seen in this light, Shaw’s evaluation then provokes the question: ‘silentest’ in relation to whom? Who, in Shaw’s story, is less silent than Jane Morris? Technically, of course, the answer is everyone (she is the silentest after all) but, in the context of the story, it is William Morris and Shaw himself who provide the immediate contrast to Jane Morris at the dinner table; as Jan Marsh has also previously noted, both men were famed for their volubility (2000: 202). Silence in this instance not only distinguishes Jane Morris as a character from the others in the scene but is also depicted as a wholly negative quality: it marks Jane Morris as deficient in some way – whether in regard to hospitality, intelligence, or political engagement is not specified – and Shaw’s inelegant term (‘silentest’) serves to exaggerate this quality as a defining characteristic. How would our image of Jane Morris be altered, however, if we considered her silence in relation to the garrulousness of her husband, or the predominance of masculine conversation in the Morris household? One biographer who has done so is Rosalie Glynn Grylls who, in Portrait of Rossetti, wrote of this incident with Shaw: ‘It was boredom had reduced [Jane] to silence’ (1964a: 119). My point here is not to accept Grylls’s evaluation as more historically accurate than Shaw’s but to show how a trait may be open to variant interpretations in different contexts and when juxtaposed with other characters represented.4 Taken at face value, such a trait fixes a character within a limited – and limiting – depiction, without sufficient complexity or flexibility to provide a plausible account of dynamic social relationships, or of human subjectivity as it evolves over the course of a lifespan. The myth of Jane Morris co-exists with the ‘fairy-tale’ of William Morris (May Morris 1934: 360) and ‘the absurdly romantic Rossetti legend’ (Doughty and Wahl 1965: xix), myths which also sought to fix and explain the meanings attached to Morris and Rossetti, respectively. In the case of these famous men, however, the myths have been more openly subjected to contestation, revision and debate.5 Rossetti in

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xv

18/03/2013 15:50

xvi

Jane Morris

particular became a figure of notoriety and speculation during his own lifetime, combining the myth of the reclusive artist with the taint of scandal concerning drugs and sexual impropriety in an early instance of modern celebrity. In the years following his death in 1882, speculation, refutation and sensationalism concerning Rossetti’s life proliferated in biographies and memoirs, as friends, family, associates and strangers alike debated the myth of Rossetti and the significance of his work. William Morris, too, was a celebrity in his day but a figure of controversy (due to his allegiance to socialism) rather than scandal, famous for his poetry as well as the work of Morris & Company.6 Jane Morris’s life was thoroughly imbricated with the stories of these two famous men: attempts to discover the ‘real’ Rossetti or the ‘real’ Morris may appraise Jane Morris in divergent ways but she is persistently seen as the clue to explaining these legends of Victorian masculinity. Whether conspicuous by her omission, tantalisingly present through oblique references, or subjected to scandalous speculation, she was the object of desire who either inspired or thwarted their artistic vision. Despite her connection with Morris and Rossetti who have both remained figures of enduring scholarly and biographical interest, however, Jane Morris has been relatively unexamined in her own right in biography and scholarship, with the exception of Jan Marsh’s Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story 1839–1938 (first published in 1986 and re-issued in 2000) and Debra Mancoff’s largely pictorial Jane Morris: The Pre-Raphaelite Model of Beauty (2000). Both Marsh and Mancoff adopt a traditional biographical approach to their subject whereas my emphasis on textual representation situates the biographical in relation to the discourses and generic conventions through which lives are told (and re-told). The Collected Letters of Jane Morris (2012), edited by Frank C. Sharp and Jan Marsh, due to appear just as I was completing this book, marks an invaluable contribution to the study of Jane Morris but does not of itself answer the questions at the centre of this study, namely: why has there been relatively little scholarly curiosity about the woman who is credited with inspiring Rossetti and Morris? Why have scholars and biographers seemed so easily satisfied with a simplistic account of the muse, the femme fatale, the morbid beauty? And is it possible to re-interpret these stories so that she is no longer just an ancillary character in the lives of famous men? In a ground-breaking book which offered a radical reinterpretation of women’s life-writing, Landscape for a Good Woman (1987), Carolyn Steedman drew on the life narrative of her own mother to grapple anew with concepts of class, gender, shame, love, and power as explanatory devices to make sense of women’s lives, especially ‘lives for whom the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xvi

18/03/2013 15:50

Preface

xvii

central interpretative devices of the culture don’t quite work’ (1987: 5). Steedman’s project has been an important influence on my research on Jane Morris: although she was born almost a century before Steedman’s mother, Jane Morris also represented a life for whom the central interpretative devices of the culture didn’t quite work. Neither simply a middle-class wife nor a working-class woman, Jane Morris is difficult to fit within the existing frameworks or categories which have been applied to studies of Victorian women. It is this inadequate fit, I suggest, that accounts for the limited, and mostly negative, stereotype of Jane that has persisted from her life to the present. Even scholars sympathetic to the working class or adopting a feminist approach have too often perpetuated rather than interrogated the myth of Jane Morris. Steedman’s body of scholarship, from Landscape for a Good Woman (1987) to Labours Lost (2009), provides an important model of how to adapt the orthodox biographical form for accounts of female historical subjects. In her book on Margaret McMillan, for instance, Steedman described her ‘intense anxiety not to write a biography’, her struggle between a desire to construct a particular narrative and the need to present the authority of the archives (1992: 48, original emphasis). Similarly, in structuring this book thematically rather than chronologically, I also intend to signal that it is not to be read as a biography per se and readers unfamiliar with the major events of Jane Morris’s life are encouraged to consult the Chronology.7 In the case of Jane Morris, where there are limited archival resources and where the textual accounts that remain – whether published memoirs or private letters – have already been shaped by an author, I have no choice but to interpret these textual residues in a way that emphasises ‘the pastness of the past’ (Belsey 1999: 9). This approach does not constitute a repudiation of history but rather acknowledges what we might call the inauthoritative nature of archives: sources which do not, cannot, fully tell the stories of those they seek to capture, especially those without the voice or agency to exercise control over the textual traces of their lives. Reading such traces against the grain, however, provides a space for re-interpretation that takes such lives from the realm of myth and returns them to history. The remaining letters of Jane Morris provide an essential resource for this study but they do not simply speak for themselves, revealing the truth of their author. They were texts written in a specific context – of relationship, time and place – according to the various generic conventions of the letter (heartfelt confession, social obligation, informal intimacy) in which both writer and recipient are implied or constructed. Like biographies, letters are open to differing interpretations, as the following introductory chapter on life writing examines in further detail

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xvii

18/03/2013 15:50

xviii

Jane Morris

where I consider the discursive and material aspects that shape the writing of a life. I do not, therefore, simply use Jane Morris’s letters to refute representations or allegations offered by others but I juxtapose a range of textual sources, past and present, in order to examine critically the dominant aspects of the myth of Jane Morris, each of which forms a subsequent chapter. Chapter 1, ‘Scandal’, addresses the traits of ‘unfaithful wife’ and ‘object of desire’, which have been so central to the story of Jane Morris, through examining the textual history of her affairs with Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. Chapter 2, ‘Silence’, turns to a trait already mentioned briefly in this Preface and one often linked to the trait of invalidism in accounts of Jane Morris. In Chapter 3, ‘Class’, I address an aspect of the myth that is mainly present through its absence, namely Jane Morris’s working-class origins, and I argue that class re-emerges in a disguised form in the repeated assumption that Jane was politically conservative or apathetic, in sharp contrast to the radical socialism of her husband and daughters. Chapter 4, ‘Icon’, examines the inextricable connection between Jane Morris and the art of Rossetti, crucial to her enduring representation as a living tableau, a thoroughly aestheticised and uncanny spectacle. Finally, in Chapter 5, ‘Home’, I address the persistent implication that Jane Morris was a shadowy presence or non-participant in the home, family life and affections of the Morrises and instead I foreground the significance of her creative agency in this context. In each of these chapters, the myth of Jane Morris will be juxtaposed with contrasting representations and interpretations. Not entirely a counter-history but more like a dis-arming of the ‘transparency’ of myth that Barthes critiqued, these contrasting narratives seek to restore a sense of historical agency to Jane Morris. Whether as iconic siren or strategic invalid, the myth of Jane Morris has worked either to deprive her of agency or to depict it as a negative capacity: she is simultaneously passive and calculating, in many accounts. The question of Jane Morris’s agency is particularly relevant given the significance of class as a determining factor in her life story. The aspiration implicit in Jane Burden’s acceptance of William Morris’s proposal, for instance, was a desire to escape from what must have seemed an ineluctable life trajectory for a working-class woman in Oxford in the 1850s, defined by financial constraints and domestic labour. Rather than ‘a figure out of a missal’ or a ghostly presence in the lives of others, Jane Morris was a woman who actively exchanged herself for a future (see Steedman 1987: 70), resulting in a life narrative which cannot be reduced to a simple, coherent account but encompassed the contradictions of class and gender in Victorian modernity and beyond.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xviii

18/03/2013 15:50

Preface

xix

Notes 1. The poet and critic Richard Aldington shared an abiding interest in the PreRaphaelite circle with the Imagist poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), long after their marriage ended in 1919. The ‘Pre-Raffs’, as the couple referred to them, recur as topics of discussion in their correspondence, with Aldington particularly fascinated by William Morris and H. D. by Elizabeth Siddall (resulting in her novel about Siddall, White Rose and the Red, unpublished during H. D.’s lifetime). See Dunstan (2010). I am grateful to Angela Dunstan for directing my attention to this correspondence. 2. Marsh wrestled with a similar problem in Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, noting that it seemed ‘solemn and unsisterly’ to refer to the Pre-Raphaelite women by their surnames. Marsh concluded that the ‘guiding principles of equality and intelligibility were . . . often impossible to combine’ and, in the main, referred to her subjects by their first names (1985: 11). 3. Variant spellings resulted from Rossetti’s intervention in deleting the final ‘l’ in Siddal(l). See Cherry and Pollock (1984) and Hawksley (2004: 32). Rossetti also referred to Siddall by a range of nicknames (including Guggums, Gug, the Sid). 4. As I will show in Chapter 2, Grylls’s depiction of Jane Morris did not always demonstrate the same degree of critical scrutiny regarding the attribution of culturally-constructed notions of feminine identity. 5. May Morris, for instance, wrote two letters to the TLS (8 May 1919 and 17 May 1934) to defend her father’s character, rather than his literary reputation, through challenging what she saw as counter-factual claims that she feared were gaining currency. In 1919, May responded to a characterisation by Blunt who, according to May, gave ‘a somewhat misleading impression’ of William Morris in his then-recently published My Diaries that could ‘develop into a legend of moroseness and selfishness. I don’t want the legend of a morose hermit, unwilling to hold a helping hand to man or woman, to grow around my father’s memory. It is so wide of the mark’ (1919: 280). Similarly, in 1934, May refuted the image of Morris as cold or uncharitable: ‘This is becoming almost a legend, and . . . I think a word may be said to try to arrest the growth of the legend’ (1934: 360). 6. See Pinkney (2005) for examples of newspaper profiles and articles on Morris as a larger-than-life figure during his lifetime. 7. Another influence on my thematic approach was Rosemarie Bodenheimer’s The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans, organised as a ‘series of connected yet discontinuous chapters,’ each of which ‘focuses on one of the intractable issues in George Eliot’s mental and moral life’ (1996: xiv).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xix

18/03/2013 15:50

Chronology of Jane Morris’s life and related events

1839

1857

1858 1859

1860

1861

1862

Jane Burden was born in Oxford (19 October), the third of four children born to Ann Maizey and Robert Burden (a stablehand). Jane Burden, seated in the audience of a theatrical production in Oxford with her sister Bessie, was ‘discovered’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and invited to sit as an artist’s model (October). Rossetti was in Oxford to paint murals in the Oxford Union building, together with William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, Val Prinsep, Arthur Hughes and Spencer Stanhope. Jane Burden modelled first for Rossetti and subsequently for William Morris, who painted La Belle Iseult, his only known completed oil painting. Jane Burden and William Morris became engaged in the spring. Jane and William were married at St Michael’s, Oxford (26 April). Morris’s family did not attend the wedding. The couple travelled in Europe before returning to live in lodgings in London in June. Dante Gabriel Rossetti married Elizabeth Siddall (23 May). Edward Burne-Jones married Georgiana Macdonald (9 June). William and Jane move into the newly-built Red House at Bexleyheath (June). Jane’s first child, Jane Alice (known as Jenny) Morris, was born (17 January). The design firm, Morris, Marshall Faulkner & Co (which also included Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown and Dante Gabriel Rossetti as directors), usually referred to as the Firm, was founded (April). Elizabeth Siddall’s child is still-born (2 May). Elizabeth Siddall dies of a laudanum overdose (February).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xx

18/03/2013 15:50

Chronology of Jane Morris’s life and related events

1865

1868

1869

1870

1871

xxi

Dante Gabriel Rossetti buries a notebook of his poetry with his wife’s body. Jane’s second child Mary (known as May) Morris was born (25 March). Robert Burden, Jane Morris’s father, dies (11 February). Bessie Burden came to live with the Morrises. Jane Morris resumed modelling for Rossetti. During the summer, the photographer John Robert Parsons took photographs of Jane Morris at Rossetti’s home, Tudor House, 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. The Morrises left Red House (which was subsequently sold), moving to 26 Queen Square, London, where the family lived above the Firm’s premises (November). It is conjectured that the affair between Jane and Gabriel began.1 Some of Rossetti’s most famous depictions of Jane Morris, including Mrs William Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), La Pia de’ Tolomei and Mariana date from this year. The first two volumes of William Morris’s Earthly Paradise are published. William Morris travelled with Jane to Bad Ems, Germany, where she underwent a course of hydrotherapy for an undisclosed medical problem (June–September). Dante Gabriel Rossetti obtained an exhumation order to retrieve a notebook of his poetry from his wife’s grave (5 October). Gabriel and Jane spent a period of time alone together in the early part of the year, ostensibly recovering from respective illnesses, in a cottage belonging to Barbara Bodichon at Scalands. Rossetti’s Poems published. Jane’s mother, Ann Maizey Burden, died (2 February). William Morris, Rossetti, and Frederick Ellis (publisher and friend of Morris’s) signed a lease on Kelmscott Manor, near Lechlade. Gabriel, Jane and her daughters spent the summer at Kelmscott while William travelled to Iceland for the first time. In October, Robert Buchanan pseudonymously published an attack on Rossetti’s poetry, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, in the Contemporary Review which had far-reaching consequences that unfolded over the following year; Rossetti became increasingly obsessed with this attack and it has been linked to the onset of his paranoid delusions.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xxi

18/03/2013 15:50

xxii

Jane Morris

1872

The Morris family moved from Queen Square to Horrington House, Turnham Green, West London. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, suffering from suicidal paranoia and hallucinations, was removed from London (June). Primarily in the care of Dr Thomas Hake and his son George, Rossetti was eventually taken to Scotland to recover in isolation. After some improvement, Rossetti returned to Kelmscott Manor in early September to complete his convalescence, joined by Jane and her daughters. He remained there alone over the winter and throughout 1873. 1873 Rossetti designed personal stationery for Jane Morris with a pansy motif (several proof versions exist but it was never produced). Jane models for Proserpine for Rossetti. Over the summer, William Morris makes a second voyage to Iceland; Jane and her daughters returned to Kelmscott Manor. 1874 Rossetti resumed residence at Tudor House, Chelsea. Jenny and May Morris began attending Notting Hill High School. 1876 Jane Morris spent part of the winter (1875–6) with Rossetti at Bognor, modelling for Astarte Syriaca. Rossetti’s chloral dependence worsens. The affair seems to have ended sometime this year. During the summer, Jenny Morris suffered her first epileptic seizure. Her formal education ended. 1877 Jane and her daughters accompanied Rosalind and George Howard to Oneglia, Italy, in the hope the trip would be beneficial for Jenny’s health (winter–spring 1878). 1878 William Morris travelled to Italy to escort his family home in the spring. After the Morrises’ return to England, the family moved to Kelmscott House, Hammersmith (October). 1880–1 Jane returned to Italy with the Howards, for the winter. She travelled on to Florence visiting Marie Spartali Stillman, where she also met Vernon Lee. 1882 Rossetti died at Birchington (9 April). 1883 William Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation (January). Jane Morris met Wilfrid Scawen Blunt at Naworth, the home of the Howards (August). 1884 Late in the year, William Morris and other members of the SDF

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xxii

18/03/2013 15:50

Chronology of Jane Morris’s life and related events

1885

1887

1889 1890

1891

1892 1894 1896

1899 1902

1913 1914

xxiii

executive seceded to form the Socialist League. Jane and her daughters travelled to Italy with the Howards (winter/spring). May Morris took managerial responsibility for the embroidery section of Morris and Company. Jane and Jenny Morris travelled to Italy. May Morris became engaged to Harry Sparling, a socialist colleague of William’s (spring). Blunt stayed at Kelmscott with the Morrises (summer). His diary records a tryst with Jane Morris during this visit. May Morris married Sparling (14 June). William Morris established the Hammersmith Socialist Society (autumn). Jenny Morris suffered a severe health crisis, including meningitis (February). William Morris also suffered physical collapse as a result. Jane returned to Italy (November). May Morris separated from Sparling (May). Death of William Morris at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith (3 October). Jane and May Morris visited the Blunts in Egypt (winter). J. W. Mackail’s Life of William Morris published. Construction commenced on two cottages in Kelmscott village, commissioned by Jane Morris, designed by Philip Webb, in memory of William Morris. Jane Morris completed the purchase of Kelmscott Manor (December). Death of Jane Morris in Bath (26 January).

NOTE 1. A notebook of Rossetti’s includes a sketch for a bracelet design, incorporating the dates ‘Sept 1857 – April 14 1868’ (BL, Ashley 1410.1). The first date corresponds to Rossetti’s first sighting of Jane Burden at Oxford so it has been assumed that the second date marks a significant event in their relationship and that the bracelet was designed with Jane Morris in mind (she is depicted wearing a similar bracelet in Rossetti’s Mrs William Morris (The Blue Silk Dress)).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xxiii

18/03/2013 15:50

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd xxiv

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

There are private histories belonging to every family, which, though they operate powerfully upon individual happiness, ought never to be named beyond the home-circle. Sarah Stickney Ellis (1843: 151) Why should there be any special record of me when I have never done any special work? Jane Morris (1904; Faulkner 1986: 121)

In recent years, the study of Victorian life writing has increasingly begun to recognise the generic instability and hybridity of auto/biographical modes.1 Lives can be narrated through a wide range of textual forms – letters, diaries, speeches, testimonies, gossip – as well as through visual texts or material artefacts. As David Amigoni has noted, the challenge for life-writing research is to use such rich resources to map the relations between the multiple sources of subjectivity in the writing of Victorian lives (2006: 2). But how do we narrate a life when these resources are more limited? In the case of Jane Morris, a paucity of textual sources has often been enhanced by reference to the creative work of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, as if their literary and artistic productions could illuminate her life as well as theirs. The powerful imagery of Rossetti’s paintings, for instance, becomes in some scholarly or biographical accounts a writing of Jane Morris’s life, variously depicting her as a seductive object of desire, as an ill-treated and melancholic wife, or as a powerfully androgynous figure. Rossetti’s imagery of Jane could seem, to contemporaries as well as later scholars, to provide the key to decode both the complex emotional history of the artist and the inscrutability of Jane Morris. Read in this way, the labour of the artist’s model was not ‘special work’ on her part but merely a conduit for the expression of the artist’s personal feelings. The myth of Jane Morris, then, has tended to conflate what Sarah

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 1

18/03/2013 15:50

2

Jane Morris

Stickney Ellis calls ‘private histories’ – and the gossip, innuendo and speculation that threaten the sanctity of the family circle – with public recognition arising from her ‘special work’ as an artist’s model that has made her one of the most recognised and reproduced faces of nineteenth-century art. My aim throughout this book is to examine the textual traces of the life of Jane Morris in a way which complicates that visual record, to show how recognisable feminine traits were projected onto the face and body of Jane Morris to narrate a coherent life story. Instead, I want to propose an alternative life narrative for Jane Morris that is in part autobiographical or at least ‘self-referential’ in the sense that it draws on traces of the self authored by Jane Morris (Smith and Watson 2001: 6, 3). In addition to her surviving correspondence, I argue that her handiwork (such as embroidery and keepsake books) that incorporated a form of signature or personalised embellishment may be read as instances of life writing and comprise a form of textual history. My alternative account, therefore, will be premised on the assumption that selves are constructed through both material and discursive processes and that we can interpret these processes of self-construction through the objects that remain – letters, embroidery, designs. The embodied self who wrote the letter or embroidered the coverlet, that is, can only be accessed through the material traces left behind, traces which were themselves shaped by conventions and practices concerning art and authorship, emotions and relationships, gender and class. What we might call biography at the level of the signifier is emphatically textual though not solely literary: it depends on reading and interpreting the traces, both material and discursive, which form the history of representations of Jane Morris.2 Such an account does not appeal to the experience of Jane Morris as ‘an originary point of explanation’ transparently revealed through these traces but as discursively constructed through diverse textual sources (Scott 1992: 24, 26, 37). If we are attentive to issues of form, tone and audience/recipient, and to the coded (although shifting) ways in which class, gender and sexuality are addressed or constructed in these texts and traces, a different kind of life story may emerge, one that is not confined to narratives of heterosexual romance, desire or betrayal – as in Rossetti’s artistic depictions of Jane – but speaks of the possibilities for creative agency, intellectual development and sustaining friendships. Throughout, I will pay particular attention to class and subjectivity, with reference to Pierre Bourdieu’s articulation of habitus, in order to understand the formation of subjectivity in the historical context of the life of Jane Morris. This introductory chapter will, then, address both the discursive and material aspects of life writing that underpin this study. Firstly, I will

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 2

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

3

overview the dominant forms in which the myth of Jane Morris has been transmitted in biography, memoir and letter: namely, gossip and anecdote. I will argue that the textual practices of these forms of storytelling have occluded the historical conditions of agency and subjectivity in relation to Jane Morris and suggest how such textual forms may be open to differing modes of interpretation and evaluation if read against the grain. In the second part of this chapter, I will examine the contradictory emphasis on materiality that emerges in some tellings of the myth of Jane Morris in order to argue that the presence of material objects in anecdotes and stories may reveal more about the social context of identity formation through class and gender than has previously been acknowledged.

‘Is it not too daring, and altogether inexplicable?’: Gossip, Anecdote and Biography if Byron f-d his sister, he f-d her and there’s an end, – an absolute end, in my opinion, as far as the vital interest of his poetry goes, which is all we have to do with. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (15 September 1869, Fredeman vol. IV, 2004: 279, dashes in original)

In conventional artists’ biographies as they developed in the latter part of the nineteenth century (see Codell 2003), the artist’s wife played a necessarily ancillary role while artists’ models with any taint of scandal could easily be omitted altogether from accounts of great men’s lives. In keeping with such biographical conventions, Jane Morris has occupied a minor role, typically confined to anecdotes intended to shed light on the main subject of the biography. Similarly, in personal memoirs of the late-Victorian period, Jane Morris sometimes made a cameo appearance as a famous face, as in Richard Le Gallienne’s The Romantic ’90s where he recounted a meeting at Kelmscott Manor. At the same time, however, Jane Morris has also performed an important hermeneutic function in discussions of the literary and artistic work of Morris and Rossetti, explaining Rossetti’s art, or Morris’s poetry, or even Morris’s obsession with Icelandic culture.3 And – despite Rossetti’s impatience with the prurient interest in Byron’s private life – sexuality has loomed large in this school of interpretation: pace Foucault, it is deemed the most secret and therefore the most important hidden meaning to uncover in relation to eminent Victorians. As Deborah Cherry has recently noted: In the reassessment of the Victorians which took place from the 1960s onwards, Rossetti . . . became emblematic of the masculine artist whose

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 3

18/03/2013 15:50

4

Jane Morris artistic interests were inextricably linked with his sexual activity, a narrative in which woman figures as a sign of that sexuality and creativity . . . Rossetti’s life has provided fertile ground for staging masculine mythologies of the artist as a bohemian, wayward genius, forever in pursuit of and inspired by lovely women. (2009: 43)

David Sonstroem’s 1970 study of Rossetti exemplified this interpretative approach. While Sonstroem is forced to concede that ‘it seems impossible to construct a character-sketch [of Jane Morris] upon which all would agree’, his central purpose, ‘to explain her attractiveness for Rossetti’, presents no such difficulty, thanks to Rossetti’s ‘self-revelatory’ poetry (1970: 128). The circularity of this argument – that Rossetti’s work explains his life, and his life provides the key to interpreting his work – necessarily renders Jane as both central to the artist’s biography and yet limited to (and by) the tropes of femininity and the narratives of desire that Rossetti’s poetry and art depicted. Details of private life, then, have often been seen as an invaluable resource for literary criticism and biography but, at the same time, such biographical interpretation can blur the line between scholarship and scandal, as Rossetti’s frank expostulation about Byron insisted. The reliability and provenance of gossip as a scholarly resource particularly emerged as a problem in Rossetti scholarship with the discovery by William E. Fredeman of the correspondence between William Bell Scott and Alice Boyd in the 1960s, now preserved in the Penkill Papers at the University of British Columbia Library (see Fredeman 2003: 221–2). Due to the success of ‘the combined efforts of the Rossetti and Morris families . . . in covering the traces’ of the nature of Jane and Gabriel’s relationship, Fredeman maintained (1970–1: 98), the existence of this correspondence was invaluable. Any discussion of Jane and Gabriel in Scott’s letters, however, needs to be cognisant of the fact that Scott and Boyd were themselves involved in an extra-marital relationship, albeit of a kind in which Boyd often lived and travelled with Scott and his wife Letitia from the 1860s onwards. How, then, are we to evaluate gossip passed between Scott and Boyd – whose relationship was an open secret among their own social networks for decades – concerning the more clandestine arrangements of Jane and Gabriel? Patricia Meyer Spacks, who describes gossip as ‘fragments of lives transformed into story’ (1985: 3), argues that gossip works to maintain or extend a space of intimacy by ‘build[ing] on and implicitly articulat[ing] shared values of intimates’ (1985: 7, 15). Gossip can ‘solidify a group’s sense of itself’ by demarcating a space of belonging or acceptance and reassuring those involved in the act of gossip of their status, knowledge or authority by reiterating their distinction from the subject of gossip (Spacks 1985: 5,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 4

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

5

12).4 If, therefore, ‘The relationship [that] gossip expresses and sustains matters more than the information it promulgates’ (Spacks 1985: 5–6, emphasis added) we need to consider the significance of Scott’s GabrielJane gossip for maintaining the intimacy of Scott and Boyd in any evaluation of the reliability of Scott’s account. Scott’s communication of his observations to Boyd allowed her to feel included in a social circle even when she was physically absent at Penkill Castle in Ayrshire and, in turn, provided Scott with the opportunity to express his own interpretation of events, with the implicit hope that Boyd will confirm his judgments and thus reinforce the authority of his views. Sharing secret knowledge, then, attested to the trust and exclusivity of the Scott-Boyd relationship and implicitly reassured them of the superiority of the bond they shared as a relationship between equals that did not need to stoop to such undignified antics as Scott attributes to Gabriel. On one notable occasion, Scott recounted to Boyd a dinner party where Gabriel ‘acted like a perfect fool if he wants to conceal his attachment, doing nothing but attend to [Jane]’ before concluding that ‘they (G. & J.) will not go further than they have gone’ (PP, 26 January 1868). Scott’s letter – an amalgam of amusement, malice and smugness – constructs an ‘us’ and ‘them’ binary (we are not like that) that presumes the superior insight of the addresser and addressee (we can see through their behaviour) which Spacks identified as central to the dynamic of gossip. Moreover, even as Scott’s letters explicitly express affection for Gabriel, they always depict Jane in an unrelentingly negative light: Gabriel’s actions are assumed to derive from inappropriate but uncontainable emotion while Jane’s reserve – she ‘is cool’, Scott pronounced (PP, 26 January 1868) – is attributed to a knowing manipulation and inauthenticity of feeling. In early November, Scott confided to Boyd his belief that Rossetti’s disturbance of both ‘health and temper’ is ‘caused by an uncontrollable desire for the possession of the said L. B.’, the initials standing for ‘Lucretia Borgia’, Scott’s scathing nickname for Jane Morris (PP, 4 November 1868).5 ‘Even Mrs Street had spoken to Letitia [Scott] about Gabriel being so fond of Mrs Top [i.e. Jane Morris]’ Scott concluded, thereby neatly excluding himself from a network of gossip in which his wife, he reports, had become implicated. A few years later, Scott wrote to Boyd about a dinner at the Morrises, from which both Jane and Gabriel were noticeably absent. Jane, Scott disclosed, was ‘at [Rossetti’s] house for the night! . . . Is it not too daring, and altogether inexplicable?’ (PP, 23 October 1871). Boyd does not respond directly to Scott’s rhetorical question but their correspondence makes clear that the feelings and actions of Gabriel and Jane were considered anything but inexplicable to these observers,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 5

18/03/2013 15:50

6

Jane Morris

constituting as it did a source of absorbing interest for Scott and Boyd over several years. In discussing Scott’s letters, however, Fredeman noted their ‘matterof-factness’ and ‘absence of moral comment’, insisting that they were not ‘gossipy in the ordinary sense of the word’ but evidence of ‘mutual concern . . . for the welfare of their friend’ (1970–1: 102). Fredeman’s evaluation rather begs the question of just what the ‘ordinary sense’ of gossip would be, if not precisely this kind of communication, and whether it is not possible to circulate gossip in a matter-of-fact way? That these letters are gossip seems irrefutable, if not irreconcilable with concern despite their judgemental tone. So why was Fredeman at pains to insist that Scott was not a purveyor of gossip? Because what Scott recounted was true, or because gossip is commonly seen as a feminine mode of communication? Perhaps Fredeman’s evaluation was influenced by both these factors to some degree but it may also reflect his view of the archival significance of the Penkill Papers: in order to underline their value as ‘primary sources of great value’ (1970–1: 99), Fredeman needed to reinstate the authority of Scott, whom he (rather hyperbolically) called ‘one of the most abused figures of the nineteenth century’ (1970–1: 99). The tension between the denigration of gossip and the appeal to the authority of the archive that Fredeman’s position on Scott’s correspondence encapsulated has been marked in Pre-Raphaelite scholarship. The ‘life and letters’ approach, which relies on archival access, not only established the form and methodology of the artist biography in the late nineteenth century but has persisted as the dominant form in biographical research of writers and artists, notwithstanding the rise of feminist, Marxist or post-structuralist historiography (Cherry 2009: 31). The biographer is thus dependent on a form of communication – the private letter – that can variously be seen as a highly valued source of private knowledge or as unfounded gossip, creating a conundrum for any scholar who might want to insist on the objective value of the archive. Fredeman’s uneasiness with the genre of gossip and its apparent incompatibility with historical biography leads him to disavow the significance of gossip and its conventions of narrative, interpretation and judgement (Spacks 1985: 13) for genres of higher cultural value such as biography or history. Despite such repudiation of gossip, however, biography’s reliance on personal letters often deals in the currency of gossip and offers a similar form of transgressive pleasure deriving from ‘a kind of knowledge prohibited in normal social intercourse but made permissible by being published’ (Spacks 1985: 118). The private letter and the public biography also share common ground

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 6

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

7

in their reliance on the narrative form of the anecdote to exemplify character or provide digressive insight through the anecdote’s concern with the apparent ‘trivialities and intricacies of daily life’ (Gallagher 2000: 49). The anecdote can, as Julie Codell puts it, ‘homogenize, circulate, and reinforce types that appear explanatory’ (2003: 206, emphasis added). In Henry Treffry Dunn’s Recollections of Rossetti, for instance, Dunn follows a chapter of anecdotes concerning Rossetti’s interest in spiritualism with the following justification: In recalling the foregoing scenes, I have many times asked myself why I should relate them, and whether such things were not too trivial to set down in writing? And my answer to myself was always, that the interest displayed by Rossetti towards everything bearing on the occult gave an insight to his nature, and however inconsequential these incidents may appear, they show how largely both his poetry and his painting were influenced by the bent of his mind in that direction, and his yearning for the unseen. (1904: 62)

The value of biographical anecdote, Dunn insists, is in inverse proportion to its ‘inconsequential’ nature; the anecdote works synecdochically, that is, to fill in the larger picture of the true, if hidden, character of his subject through the accumulation of trivial details. Such anecdotes not only reveal the truth of his subject’s nature but also explain Rossetti’s art. Far from trivial, then, anecdotes are claimed to hold the key to the profound truth of subjectivity and aesthetic interpretation but to do so they rely on the cultural myth of the artist as a flawed and tormented character, beyond the mundane experience of the assumed reader. A similar function is served by anecdotes pertaining to Jane Morris in the tradition of Pre-Raphaelite biography: intended to ensure historical veracity by placing historical figures in a fixed time and place, the effect is in fact to reiterate the same paradigm of traits, to resort to the ‘frozen speech’ of myth (Barthes 1970: 127). Oswald Doughty, too, has pointed out the way that anecdotes about Jane and Gabriel which seemed to be grounded in personal observation in fact relied on a culturally embedded trope of the ardent lover and his fickle lady: The various recollections by different observers at these Pre-Raphaelite social gatherings [in the late 1860s], whether at Brown’s, Marston’s or elsewhere all resemble one another in their association of Rossetti and Janey Morris. One, a cousin of William de Morgan, vividly recalled “seeing Rossetti at a party given by Mrs Virtue Tebbs, seated in a corner feeding Mrs William Morris with strawberries. He was carefully scraping off the cream, which was bad for her, and then solemnly presenting her with the strawberries in a spoon!” (1949: 455, emphasis added)6

The fact that Doughty included such anecdotes, however, shows how irresistible such vignettes are to biographers.7 For the biographical

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 7

18/03/2013 15:50

8

Jane Morris

tradition, which combines elements of historical method (evidence drawn from letters and other archival sources) with the construction of character in ways compatible with the novel, the anecdote is thus a crucial device. It deploys literary tropes to delineate traits through the action or scene described and both reveals and relies on continuities in cultural representations of masculine and feminine roles. In the work of new historicism, considerable attention has been paid to the ‘vehement and cryptic particularity’ of the anecdote for its capacity to interrupt ‘the continuous flow of larger histories’, or to disrupt ‘history as usual’ (Gallagher 2000: 50, 51). For Stephen Greenblatt, the anecdote has an almost epiphanic dimension if interpreted correctly: it ‘is revealed, under the pressure of analysis, to represent the work from which it is drawn and the particular culture in which that work was produced and consumed’ (2000: 35). While new historicist scholarship sees the anecdote as potentially ‘enabling a history which is non-linear and sensitive to discontinuities and disturbance’, however, anecdotes always circulate in a culture of already-given meanings (Colebrook 1997: 216). Against the authority of the archive assumed by traditional biographers or the transgressive potential for the writing of counter-history that Greenblatt attributes to the anecdote, then, I want to emphasise instead what Louis Montrose has famously termed ‘the textuality of history’: By the textuality of history, I mean to suggest, firstly, that we can have no access to a full and authentic past, a lived material existence, unmediated by the surviving textual traces of the society in question – traces whose survival we cannot assume to be merely contingent but must rather presume to be at least partially consequent upon complex and subtle social processes of preservation and effacement; and secondly, that those textual traces are themselves subject to subsequent textual mediations when they are construed as the ‘documents’ upon which historians ground their own texts, called ‘histories.’ (Montrose 1989: 20, original emphasis)

The ‘textual traces’ of the life of Jane Morris provide a frustratingly narrow range of archival resources, making plain that ‘access to a full and authentic past’ can never be achieved. Those traces that survive are the result of conflicting impulses ‘of preservation and effacement’. On the one hand, she was not considered significant enough to warrant a more extensive memorialisation; on the other, she was considered too significant and therefore removed from, or otherwise silenced, in accounts that could have explained the extent of her role in the lives of others (with William Michael Rossetti’s scholarship on his brother providing probably the best example of this latter strategy, as the following chapter explores further). What remains are brief glimpses, anecdotes, or narrative fragments, that have been repeated to ensure a

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 8

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

9

consistency of character, to fix the paradigm of traits attributed to Jane Morris, but which can be read against the grain to open up alternative interpretations or generate other stories. Rossetti, that is, was both right and wrong about the significance of Byron and his relationship with his sister: the biographical anecdote may be inadequate as a resource of literary criticism but still sheds light on the cultural context and values within which it circulates, and provides us with a valuable textual resource that can be interpreted anew to challenge the coherence of the character portrayed.8 Throughout this book, then, I will examine the anecdotes that have maintained the myth of Jane Morris, as well as less well-known stories that offer a different representation that may be considered counteranecdotes in a sense. In the process, these counter-anecdotes will also critically challenge the prevailing modes of biography in Pre-Raphaelite scholarship. Even with the critique of the ‘great man’ tradition of biographical research in the twentieth century, marked by the rise of Marxist and feminist historical approaches in particular, the representation of Jane Morris did not shift to the degree one might have expected. Jan Marsh’s trail-blazing scholarship on Pre-Raphaelite women has been in many ways exemplary but there is an inconsistency in her depiction of Jane Morris that perpetuates some aspects of the myth, such as her interpretation of Jane Morris’s ‘culpability’ in her affairs with Rossetti and Blunt or her invalidism (matters I discuss more fully in Chapters 1 and 2, respectively).9 E. P. Thompson’s representation of Jane Morris in his biography of William Morris, however, is another matter altogether. In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, Thompson provided an astute understanding of the ideological function of cultural myth in regard to William Morris (1976: 749–50), only to reiterate and emphatically endorse the myth of his subject’s wife, contending that ‘All accounts agree’ that she was a self-absorbed neurotic invalid (1976: 158). In his 1976 Afterword, Thompson even confessed that he had not read the enlarged archive of letters that had become accessible since the first publication of William Morris in 1955 – and that allowed for a more complex understanding of the relationship between Rossetti and Jane Morris – because he considered the Morris marriage ‘has been pried into enough’ (1976: 767).10 Thompson’s clear demarcation of what is and is not appropriate for inclusion in a biography of a great man thus marks a continuity from the first authoritative biography of William Morris by J. W. Mackail, published in 1899, in which a similar concern for maintaining the sanctity of ‘private histories’ was evident. In Mackail’s Life of William Morris, Jane Morris is represented as an exemplary middle-class Victorian wife

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 9

18/03/2013 15:50

10

Jane Morris

of a famous man, largely through her absence: she is an elusive figure meriting just four entries in the index and no sustained discussion of her or the marriage is included at all. This trend was continued in May Morris’s Introductions to the Collected Works of her father (1910–15) where, despite acknowledging her mother’s role as a source of memories May does not refer to her mother by name until ‘Janey’ is mentioned in an extract quoted from a Rossetti letter written from Kelmscott in 1871. The most recent full-length biography of William Morris, that of Fiona MacCarthy published in 1994, also treats Jane Morris in a somewhat ambivalent manner, acknowledging the limitations of the mythic representation that has dogged her while also repeating some of its elements (such as Jane’s strategic invalidism, for instance). The tendency of William Morris’s biographers to sympathise with their subject is also common in Rossetti’s biographical tradition, a tendency that – in both cases – has consequences for the representation of Jane Morris that emerges. After Rossetti’s death in 1882, books and articles proliferated, characterised by varying degrees of concealment and disclosure concerning Rossetti’s private history and in which, therefore, Jane Morris is either entirely absent or present in coded form. More explicit disclosures did not occur until later when Rossetti insiders, William Bell Scott and T. Hall Caine (in 1892 and 1928, respectively), made unequivocal statements about the nature of Rossetti’s feelings for Jane. By 1949, however, Helen Rossetti Angeli, who opened the biography of her uncle with a chapter called ‘Denigration’, could claim that no ‘distinguished man of English art or letters of the nineteenth century has been so repeatedly and so unaccountably attacked as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’ (1949: 2). Angeli further claimed that a desire to ‘debunk Rossetti’ had become the overriding aim in the biographical scholarship (1949: 3), making clear that her account would be reparative, if not defensive.11 Given this aim, Jane Morris has a special place in Angeli’s account, as Rossetti’s true love, pre-dating his marriage to Elizabeth Siddall, and thus providing the ‘clue to the tragedy of Rossetti’s life’ (1949: 212). As I will discuss further in Chapter 4, Angeli’s biography simultaneously accorded a significant role to Jane because of her influence on Rossetti’s art and, for the same reason, cast Rossetti’s muse as a kind of helpmeet who served the painter-poet’s genius. Appearing in the same year as Angeli’s, Doughty’s magisterial biography of Rossetti also included the relationship with Jane Morris as a significant factor in Rossetti’s life (see Chapter 1). In 1964, however, Rosalie Glynn Grylls’s Portrait of Rossetti offered perhaps the most positive account of Jane Morris to appear prior to the rise of feminist scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s. Jane Morris was ‘not a goddess’, Grylls insisted, but was

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 10

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

11

‘unexpectedly intelligent; capable of mastering foreign languages and absorbing serious books. That she could be on terms of intimacy with people like the liberal-intellectual Howards and the Scawen-Blunts . . . presents yet another puzzle’ (1964a: 236). As this quotation makes clear, though, Grylls’s qualified re-assessment was still framed by the long shadow cast by the myth (unexpectedly intelligent?) as she struggled with the ‘puzzle’ of Jane Morris. Throughout the Morris and Rossetti biographical traditions, then, Jane Morris is depicted in relation to the male artist, serving to illustrate his creativity and illuminate his emotional history. Gender and sexuality become central to the mythology of Jane Morris (as model, muse, wife or adulteress) but that other key determinant of identity in the Victorian period – class – does not feature significantly in any of the life re-tellings. If it is true that ‘We get back the answers only to the questions we ask of a life’ (Holmes 1995: 19), I want to ask: where is class in the life of Jane Morris? In the following section, I will foreground how class may be returned to the life narrative of Jane Morris through considering some of the anecdotes that have seemed to confirm the ‘falsely obvious’ meaning of the myth, anecdotes in which material objects figure significantly. Attending to the material culture through which class identity is signified and negotiated, and critically engaging with the work of Pierre Bourdieu, I will suggest that the association between class and things offers a new understanding of agency in the life of Jane Morris that will underpin my analysis throughout this book.

Suet and Strawberries: Life Writing and Habitus The vignettes of Janey feeding the vegetarian Shaw pudding with suet in it, Janey proferring a jar of quince jam to le Gallienne, and Janey eating strawberries from the hand of the solicitous Rossetti are not very revealing. (Sonstroem 1970: 125)

The stories Sonstroem dismisses as ‘not very revealing’ are the ones that seem to me the most vivid: Jane Morris concealing from the vegetarian George Bernard Shaw that her pudding contained meat-derived shortening until after he had consumed two helpings; Richard Le Gallienne bedazzled by an ethereal Jane Morris over tea at Kelmscott Manor but leaving with a jar of homely jam; and Rossetti carefully scraping the cream from strawberries before feeding them to Jane Morris at an evening party in the 1860s. These are all anecdotes about things, powerfully evoking a sense of time and place, and depicting an everyday world, uncanny and humorous by turns, in which food is central to

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 11

18/03/2013 15:50

12

Jane Morris

social life. Taking issue with the claim that these anecdotes are ‘not very revealing’, I am reminded of Steedman’s description of Landscape for a Good Woman as ‘a book about things (objects, entities, relationships, people) . . . Above all it is about people wanting those things, and the structures of political thought that have labelled this wanting as wrong’ (1987: 23, original emphasis). The things in these stories about Jane Morris say something about the social setting and networks of relationships within which objects are given, received and consumed. Things, that is, not only signify but they attract desires, prohibitions or judgements; they tell us ‘something we already know about the subjects who use them’, as Elaine Freedgood puts it, even when (or especially when?) these things are ‘largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text’ in which they appear (2010: 2).12 Things look different – and mean differently – depending on the perspective of the observer or participant, the reader or author. Each of the anecdotes that Sonstroem summarises only to dismiss depicts a scene of gift-exchange centred on food that establishes a relationship of some kind between Jane Morris and a notable man. In the first story, suet – derived from beef or mutton fat and a staple of British domestic cookery and valuable source of nutrition – is served within the everyday environment of the family dinner but becomes, in Shaw’s telling, a form of power struggle with a hostess who dismisses modern dietary regimes (and their practitioners) as faddish. Although a joke at his own expense, Shaw’s story also depicts Jane Morris as a traditional woman, unsympathetic to modern ideas like vegetarianism (or socialism) and thus alienated from the progressivism he associates with himself and, to a lesser extent, William Morris. Similarly, the jar of quince jam combines the mundane with the unworldly in Le Gallienne’s telling where a commonplace practice – a woman making her own jam – is rendered a preternatural occurrence because of Le Gallienne’s perception of Jane Morris as more myth than woman, as if she had offered him a pomegranate instead of a pottle. There is something particularly appropriate about the choice of quince jam in this context: the yellow-skinned fruit, virtually inedible unless cooked, undergoes an almost magical transformation, the pale flesh becoming a delicate, translucent shade of pink when strained to make jelly or a vibrant rosy-orange colour when made as jam.13 With both Shaw and Le Gallienne, then, Jane Morris is situated in a relation of hospitality, offering the gift of food to a male guest in her role as hostess. The practical joke that Shaw experiences, like Le Gallienne’s incredulity, at the same time draws attention to an anomaly in her performance of femininity: hostesses are not supposed to trick their guests; goddesses are not supposed to make jam.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 12

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

13

The strawberry anecdote, too, depicts a scenario in which something anomalous occurs, signalled both by the reversal of gender roles in culinary service – a man offering food to a woman – and the significance of the strawberry, as a signifier of privilege and luxury. Jane’s acceptance of strawberries from Rossetti’s hand is a transaction of a very different kind from domestic hospitality, marking an intimacy between the two and implying an illicit dimension to the transaction resonant of the temptation scene in Eden. It is perhaps no coincidence that Thomas Hardy used a similar scenario in Tess of the d’Urbervilles, where the workingclass Tess accepts a strawberry from the wealthy man of the world, Alec d’Urberville, prefiguring her seduction and fall at his hands: the tragedy inherent in such cross-class liaisons being symbolised through a gift associated with privileged consumption. In these stories of suet, strawberries and jam, the meanings associated with the edible object and the social setting in which the transaction takes place convey something more significant about Jane Morris than Sonstroem allows. She becomes a feminine enigma, riven with contradictions – part-goddess, part-housewife – who confounds the expectations of her observers. These three anecdotes, then, condense a surfeit of assumptions about both gender and class that surface through the narrators’ sense that something about Jane Morris is anomalous (is she an icon or matron? demure or duplicitous?). These stories, we might say, record an encounter between ‘history in bodies and history in things’ which Pierre Bourdieu (1997) has argued may result in an awareness (registered as tension or sense of dis-ease) of how differently-classed subjects embody different social worlds that shape their behaviour, attitudes or perceptions. Influenced by Bourdieu, I proceed from the assumption that class is more than a social identity or a structure of feeling: it is a system of embodied dispositions, experienced as natural, that ‘internalize our social location and . . . orient our actions’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 520, 522). In particular, I will draw on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as it has been critically applied in gender and cultural studies in recent years.14 Habitus can be loosely defined ‘as a system of internalized predispositions that mediate between abstract and largely invisible social structures and the everyday activities of individuals’ (Maynes et al. 2008: 31). It is acquired through the social environment we inhabit, beginning from earliest childhood, and constructs our way of being-in-the-world – acting, seeing, feeling and thinking. Habitus is thus about both habit and habitat but is not reducible to either. For Bourdieu, habitus is always enacted in specific social and geographic space and is, in effect, ‘embodied history . . . the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ in the life of social subjects (1990: 56). The emphasis on

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 13

18/03/2013 15:50

14

Jane Morris

embodiment here is crucial: habitus is produced and expressed through our movements, gestures, manners, emotions, and ways of looking at the world and is – first and foremost – a bodily process (Moi 1999: 282; Bourdieu 1997: 138–41). The anecdotes of social encounters centred on food – always a rich site of cultural conventions and assumptions – provide a good example of how largely tacit social forms (such as rituals of hospitality or beliefs regarding femininity) become more visible through the mundane activities of individuals (eating, visiting), especially when the normal expectations of such encounters are disrupted in some way. In looking closely at textual accounts of Jane Morris, I am particularly interested in how they may record – or, more commonly, occlude – her history of social transformation, from working-class woman to middle-class wife and (almost) celebrity. Examining the representation of class – as it may be expressed through behaviour, appearance, beliefs or feelings – requires, therefore, an account of class that acknowledges the possibility of change or transition in class location or identification. Bourdieu’s delineation of habitus, which he proposed as a means to overcome the limitations of accounts of class formation that privileged either social determination or individual agency, seems especially relevant in this context. Being ‘a product of history, that is of social experience and education’, habitus ‘may be changed by history, that is by new experiences, education or training’, although Bourdieu acknowledged that such transformations are not easily accomplished (2002: 29, original emphasis). What results from encounters between the ‘sedimented histories’ of habitus and specific spaces, objects or other social actors in a person’s life is neither inevitable nor predetermined: past gestures, actions or feelings may be repeated or new and different responses improvised. In his later work in particular, Bourdieu stressed that habitus ‘is not a fate, not a destiny’ but a ‘generative capacity’ (2002: 29, 30). Able to explain both the durability and transformability of dispositions, beliefs and practices, the concept of habitus, then, offers a dynamic account of subjectivity, of ‘socialized bodies’ who develop, change and adapt over the temporal duration of a lifetime (Bourdieu 1997: 137; Maynes et al. 2008: 32). Bourdieu, however, was primarily interested in the formation and perpetuation of class and class distinctions and so his concept of habitus has been used to explain the continuity of class-based assumptions and identities, sometimes leading to the charge that his account assumed a unified set of dispositions within a class (Bennett 2007: 203), or over-emphasised the reproduction of existing class relations (Noble and Watkins 2003: 524), rather than taking into account the possibility for social change. For example, Bourdieu explained that habitus is

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 14

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

15

reinforced through familiarity with particular contexts or practices, allowing a person to inhabit the world ‘like a garment [un habit] or a familiar habitat’ and so to feel ‘at home in the world because the world is also in [her], in the form of habitus’ (1997: 143). Such familiarity is enhanced by observing others who are products of similar conditions, generating a shared notion of ‘the done thing’, for example, which ratifies the subject’s behaviour, her ways of being and doing, and maintains a recognisable social world as a result. This picture of the known or familiar social world is only part of the account of habitus, however. Bourdieu also considered how habitus may be transformed through situations in which the subject may not feel at home, may become aware of the limitations of her practical knowledge arising from her past history, or may experience a new consciousness of the need to improvise in an unfamiliar setting. If, Bourdieu argues, ‘the principle of the transformation of habitus lies in the gap, experienced as a positive or negative surprise, between expectations and experience, one must suppose that the extent of this gap and the significance attributed to it depend on habitus’ (1997: 148). One person’s shame or failure, that is, may be another’s liberation or creativity. In this way, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus allows for an exploration of ‘the interdependence of social determination and human agency, the structured and generative capacity of human action’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 522). It also acknowledges the possibility of a habitus clivé, a divided habitus, arising from the experience of social mobility (the rise from low social origins to a higher social status, for instance, through education or marriage) which Bourdieu described as ‘the encounter of two histories’ which may result in ‘destabilised habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division’, when subjects experience or inhabit contradictory social positions (Bourdieu 1997: 150, 160; Bennett 2007: 201, 222). While Bourdieu’s research was mostly devoted to the analysis of social class in contemporary (French) society, the temporal depth implicit in his theory of habitus makes it possible to apply these ideas to the life of a specific historical subject. The life narrative of Jane Morris, who experienced a radical change in social status and wealth on her marriage to William Morris, may be understood as an instance where social mobility enabled the transformation of habitus. Moving from a working-class family in Oxford into the semi-bohemian milieu of the Pre-Raphaelite circle as well as the comfort of middle-class affluence, Jane Morris acquired a way of being-in-the-world that would have been marked by profound dislocation but which also provided opportunities for agency – the capacity to ‘act otherwise’, as Anthony Giddens puts it (1986: 14). Her life exemplifies ‘the encounter of two histories’ Bourdieu described,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 15

18/03/2013 15:50

16

Jane Morris

in which the embodied practices internalised as habitus during early life continued to evolve through ‘lived experience over time and in particular interpersonal, social, cultural, and historical settings’ (Maynes et al. 2008: 33). The stories told by her contemporaries of a woman who could be perceived as either a gracious hostess or an aloof presence at social events, for instance, may show us some of the ‘mismatches’ or ‘discordance’ that resulted from the responses of habitus to unfamiliar situations (Bourdieu 1997: 159) and remind us that not only were Jane Morris’s actions shaped by habitus but so too the interpretations made by middle-class observers were inflected by their own acquired understanding of gender, class and social performance. Re-interpreting the myth of Jane Morris as the product of a tension, sometimes a clash, between ‘the histories of bodies and the histories of things’, then, means that the things that feature in the anecdotes concerning Jane Morris take on a particular resonance. Suet and strawberries, that is, carry connotations of habitus, representing ways of being-in-the-world that may be discordant but which co-existed in the life of Jane Morris and within the social networks in which she was observed. In highlighting the objects that recur in the representations of Jane Morris, and the materiality of the representations themselves, I seek to emphasise the question of agency as it is revealed – or occluded – in the life narrative of Jane Morris. An important consideration in this regard will be creative or expressive objects: the dress made for a modelling session, the cache of letters given to a lover for safe-keeping, the embroidery collaboratively produced with her husband. Such objects, emblematic of social relationships whether professional or intimate (and sometimes hard to distinguish), carry affective significance evidenced by their continuing presence in the reiterated stories. These objects, through their metonymic or indexical relation to Jane Morris, speak of a sense of self that is relational – formed and understood through a complex network of relationships with others – but they also speak of a subject who claimed the capacity to act meaningfully in a world of objects and other social actors. The coverlet made for her husband’s bed (discussed in Chapter 5), for instance, which bears the embroidered signature ‘Jane Morris. Kelmscott’, signifies not only the location and the relationship which anchored and contextualised this artefact but effectively makes a claim of authorship, asserting her role as creator or producer of the aesthetic object akin to an artist’s signature on a canvas. The imbrication of intimacy and creativity in these things, moreover, speak of a transformed habitus in which the aesthetic dimension is crucial to a new, or improvised, way of being-in-the-world that makes such creative agency possible. Within a social milieu in which men and women

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 16

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

17

crafted, designed, produced, exchanged and discussed aesthetic objects, Jane Morris actively shared in networks of cultural capital.15 The exclusion of women from some of the more formal avenues to acquire cultural capital in the nineteenth century (such as through education or professionalisation) was mitigated to varying degrees by (some) women’s access to cultural literacy through family associations or other intimate relationships. If, however, ‘The ways our bodies act and look, our physical properties, embody the capital – economic, social, cultural – we possess’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 522), women, traditionally associated with all things bodily, also had a problematic relation to cultural capital in that they could seem to be the vehicle of cultural capital, as it were, rather than subjects who legitimately possessed or expressed it. Whether as portrait model or fashion plate, a woman’s aesthetic style or cultural accoutrements could be a means of expressing someone else’s cultural capital (a husband or artist, for instance) rather than her own. Jane Morris may have acquired a form of celebrity derived from her association with art but she lacked recognition as an aesthetic subject or a skilled professional in her own right. Effectively objectified in this way, Jane Morris was read as a thing rather than a body, deprived of agency. Recently, however, the notion of ‘bodily capital’ has been proposed – ‘as a physiognomy of signs that express social status and power to be recognised or misrecognised’ (Noble and Watkins 2003: 523) – that may provide a useful tool for elucidating the role of Jane Morris as cultural icon. The acquisition of a specific set of bodily skills and dispositions through the labour of artistic modelling could be mis-recognised either as a natural state or as an embodiment of the artist’s cultural capital (hence the many rapturous observations by contemporaries that Jane Morris looked just like a Rossetti painting). Instead, I propose that modelling be seen as a form of bodily training that combined deliberately learned corporeal techniques with the cultivation of an aesthetic consciousness that collaboratively improvised with the artist in the production of art. I stress the significance of the body as a source of agency and the site of a socially embedded subjectivity, rather than as an objectified or essentialised entity. Re-reading the textual traces and narratives of Jane Morris, then, will show how the transformation of habitus provided opportunities for the expression of ‘bodily capital’, an acquired set of corporeal skills and dispositions, and the cultivation of creative self-formation. Jane Morris’s question, posed at the opening of this chapter – ‘Why should there be any special record of me when I have never done any special work?’ – requires us to re-consider what kinds of lives and work are worth memorialising but it also requires us to interrogate how that ‘special record’, the work of memorialising, is carried out. Jane Morris

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 17

18/03/2013 15:50

18

Jane Morris

left no published writings or known diaries, and her extant correspondence is far from complete. The remaining textual accounts have largely been preserved because of the status of the men whose lives were intertwined with hers, lives of public achievement as well as private intrigue, which cannot help but affect the way we think about the significance (or otherwise) of a woman’s life (see Steedman 1992: 43). How then should we evaluate or interpret the life of Jane Morris? Is she doomed to remain another example of ‘a tradition of plot deprivation in women’s lives’, as Janet Beizer has put it (2009: 16)? To ‘write women’s biography otherwise’, Beizer contends, requires first acknowledging ‘the story of a woman’s life as always already lost, and forever irretrievable within conventional frameworks’ (2009: 36–7).16 The solution is neither to relinquish the task of life writing because of incomplete historical records, nor to provide an idealised biography – the work of what Beizer calls ‘salvation biographers’ (2009: 37) – but to pay close attention to the sources we do have, even if this results in a narrative that can only ever be incomplete. As Rosemarie Bodenheimer proposed when similarly faced with archival limitations and the assumptions of conventional lifewriting, ‘All we can do is observe, make connections, and interpretive suggestions’, reading ‘one kind of text alongside another’ (2007: 15) to re-tell a life that is always embedded in interpretation.17 Nowhere is this interpretative process more evident than in the association between Jane Morris and scandal, as Richard Aldington speculated in noting her ‘disappearance’ from the authorised biographies and as the following chapter will explore.

Notes 1. See, for instance, Peterson (1999), Amigoni (2006) and Broughton (2000). 2. I am here adapting Catherine Belsey’s approach to cultural history which she describes as ‘history at the level of the signifier’ (1999, 2001), an approach that depends on the reading/interpretation of cultural documents or objects from the past: ‘We cannot know the past outside the residues it leaves, and these remains are always subject to our interpretation’ (Belsey 1999: 12). 3. As Jerome McGann observed of Rossetti’s ‘House of Life’, for instance, this sonnet sequence ‘has often been read as poetically heightened autobiography’ (2000: 39). Harvey and Press speculated that Morris’s interest in Icelandic culture and language was a ‘welcome distraction’ from ‘the pain and distress of his failed marriage’ (1991: 73). 4. William A. Cohen has similarly stressed the way gossip operates within a circumscribed community, where the objects of gossip ‘tend to be known personally to those engaging in it’ (1996: 15).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 18

18/03/2013 15:50

Introduction: Life and Letters

19

5. It is unclear why Scott attributed this epithet to Jane: she was not the model for Rossetti’s various drawings and paintings of ‘Lucretia Borgia’ (see Surtees 1971, vol. 1: 77) so we can only infer that it was an unkind allusion to Jane’s supposed cruel treatment of her husband. This was not Scott’s only spiteful epithet for Jane, referring to her repeatedly as the ‘hollowchested matron’ for instance (e.g. PP, 14 December 1872). 6. Grylls also repeats the strawberry anecdote, again attributed only to ‘a relative of William de Morgan’ (1964a: 138). See also Todd (2001: 121). 7. To the dismay of Sydney Cockerell, for instance, who wrote a letter to the TLS in 1951 condemning Doughty’s method and his assertion of an improper relationship between Jane and Gabriel (see Chapter 1). 8. I would, then, distinguish my position from that of Greenblatt, for whom the anecdote ‘in its most awkward and inept articulations, makes a claim on the truth that is denied to the most eloquent of literary texts’ (2000: 48). I do not endow the anecdote with the same degree of eloquence as Greenblatt but interpret such stories in order to provide a different account of Jane Morris. 9. Marsh’s (2000) biography of Jane and May Morris remains to date the definitive work but see also Marsh (1987). 10. In this Afterword, Thompson also attacked Grylls’s biography of Rossetti, seeing her depiction of Morris and his marriage as an instance of a negative male stereotype that ‘has been transmitted with peculiar force within feminine conventions’ (1976: 767). 11. Angeli outlined three distinct phases in approaches to biographies of Rossetti before evaluating the current state of the field (1949: 5–6). Writing in 1970, Fredeman noted that sixteen ‘full-scale biographies’ of Rossetti were in existence (1970–1: 86), but while Rossetti scholarship has expanded considerably in recent years full-scale biographies have been fewer: Marsh’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1999) is the most substantial while J. B. Bullen’s Rossetti: Painter and Poet (2011) is the most recent. 12. Freedgood’s is one of a number of important books recently to explore the meaning of things, attentive to specificities of class, gender and location, and which have established the significance of Victorian material culture for the formation of identities, attachments and networks (whether social, economic or aesthetic). See, for example, Brown (2003), Plotz (2008) and Schaffer (2011). 13. Quinces, of course, also have a strong association with classical myth: Paris awarded a quince to Aphrodite; Atalanta stopped to pick up a quince. 14. In addition to the scholars directly referenced here, other important work on the topic includes Probyn (2004), McNay (1999) and Crossley (2001). 15. For Bourdieu, cultural capital refers to the acquisition of distinction within the field of art and culture, expressed both in forms of cultural achievement or recognition and in modes of thinking, qualities of style or sets of values (Fowler 1997: 31; Reay 2004: 58). 16. See also Steedman’s account of the ‘sadness’ of women’s history, premised as it is on a ‘sense of that which is lost, never to be recovered completely’ (1992: 43). 17. The connections I will make, however, do not include a consideration of the literary texts of William Morris or Dante Gabriel Rossetti (or Wilfrid

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 19

18/03/2013 15:50

20

Jane Morris Blunt, for that matter) to detect the presence of Jane Morris. While the literary works of Morris and Rossetti have been exhaustively mined by scholars and biographers for biographical allusions (a point to which I will return in the following chapter), I do not share the assumption that literary texts provide unmediated access to the ‘private histories’ of their authors.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 20

18/03/2013 15:50

Chapter 1

Scandal

Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak Four not exempt from pride some future day. Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek, Over my open volume you will say, ‘This man loved me’—then rise and trip away. Walter Savage Landor (Jane Morris’s keepsake book, BL, Add. 45351C)

The story goes: William Morris fell in love with Jane Burden, who had been recruited by Rossetti as a model for the murals being painted in the Oxford Union building in 1857. Frustrated both by his artistic limitations and his burgeoning feelings for his model, Morris scribbled on the back of La Belle Iseult, ‘I cannot paint you but I love you.’ Despite its uncertain provenance (re-tellings typically begin with the phrase ‘Morris is said to have’1), this anecdote serves an important purpose for Morris biographers as the founding moment of a relationship doomed from the start by mis-matched backgrounds, feelings and temperaments. Morris’s scribble is seen as a confession on two levels: an acknowledgement of artistic failure (‘I cannot paint you’), borne out by the fact that La Belle Iseult was Morris’s only known completed oil painting; and an expression of powerful emotion (‘but I love you’) that tragically implicates art and love in the Morris marriage from the outset. There is another story, however, perceived as equally foundational to the myth of Jane Morris – ‘the event that changed her life’, Marsh called it (2000: 10) – namely, Rossetti’s first sighting of Jane Burden in the audience of a theatrical performance at Oxford (Burne-Jones 1904: 168).2 This anecdote, like that of Morris’s scribble, is taken as foreshadowing the tragedy which would implicate not only Elizabeth Siddall and William Morris but Rossetti himself. While Morris’s perceived failure to represent his beloved on canvas often serves for his biographers as a kind of guarantee of his feelings, Rossetti’s apparent success in depicting

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 21

18/03/2013 15:50

22

Jane Morris

Jane in his art has also been seen as a signifier of his true and abiding love for her. As William Michael Rossetti observed in a rather different context concerning his brother’s art, ‘The works are there to tell their own tale’ (vol. 1, 1895: 245) and Jane’s presence in so much of Rossetti’s portraiture seemed an early clue to her significance in his life.3 This contradiction by which both Morris’s aesthetic failure and Rossetti’s artistic success signified the authenticity of their feelings for Jane hinges on a particular understanding of the muse as object of desire and cipher for masculine creativity in the life narrative of the artist. Not only does such an understanding erase the aesthetic labour of the model but it positions Jane within an implicitly one-sided emotional exchange in which her body incites masculine desire and creativity without the need for any correlative feelings on her own part. The slippage between the (presumably commercial) transaction between artist and model and the ensuing engagement of William and Jane further muddies the waters, leaving an impression of Jane as variously passive or calculating in both scenarios with Morris and Rossetti, without any insight into her emotional agency. As R. C. H. Briggs put it, ‘the mystery of the woman’s undoubted fascination for the two men’ remains (1964: 4). While Briggs, like others, assumes here that Morris and Rossetti’s feelings are beyond doubt, Jane’s role is not only inexplicable but necessarily so: the story of Rossetti somehow requires Jane to be the enigmatic muse that inspires the male artist to strive for the words or images to represent her as the embodiment of his desire, his love. It also situates Jane, from the first, within a triangular relationship with Morris and Rossetti that determined her destiny (and theirs) and established Rossetti as a ‘looming presence over the liaison . . . [which] helped to confirm the marriage in its doom’ (MacCarthy 1994: 141). Rossetti also loomed large in Jane Morris’s extra-marital liaison with Wilfrid Scawen Blunt from the late 1880s to the early 1890s. As recorded in Blunt’s unpublished Secret Memoirs – transcribed in 1912 at Blunt’s dictation from his private diaries – Blunt’s obsession with Rossetti and his desire to both identify with and surpass the dead poet provided the narrative motivation driving Blunt’s account of his affair with Jane Morris.4 Crucially for Blunt, Jane Morris’s allure derived from her scandalous past as Rossetti’s muse, as his diary makes explicit on more than one occasion. Public disclosure of Blunt’s affair with Jane Morris only fully emerged with the opening of his papers in the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1972 – resulting in Elizabeth Longford’s biography of Blunt, A Pilgrimage of Passion (1979) and the publication of Jane Morris’s letters to Blunt, edited by Peter Faulkner (1986). As Blunt’s papers make clear, however, Jane was surpassed in significance

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 22

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

23

by many other women who featured in Blunt’s emotional history including ‘Skittles’, the famous courtesan Catherine Walters, and Margaret Talbot whom Blunt considered at one time the love of his life (see Secret Memoirs, vol. XIII). Jane Morris’s connection with sexual scandal, then, was a complex one. On the one hand, her association with Rossetti – arguably her chief claim to fame in the century following her death – has been the subject of much speculation and debate since at least 1868. On the other, the scandal attached to Jane Morris never generated the kind of public notoriety that women such as Caroline Norton or Lillie Langtry suffered.5 Just as her celebrity was of an unusual sort – her face was recognisable but her name not necessarily widely known in Victorian print culture – her relationship with Rossetti was unevenly and ambivalently disclosed: at first, a source of gossip among insiders, then hinted or implied in articles discussing Rossetti’s art following his death, before finally being explicitly named in later published works.6 As recently as the lifting of the embargo on Rossetti’s correspondence with Jane Morris in the British Library in 1964, the existence of a fully-fledged affair could still be disputed but, as Deborah Cherry has observed, it has ‘become almost impossible to write about the Pre-Raphaelites without some reference to love affairs’ (2009: 41–2) and Jane Morris’s role in the scholarship surrounding Rossetti is an obvious case in point. In this chapter, therefore, my aim is not to counter the myth of Jane Morris’s sexuality but to contextualise her illicit relationships and the narratives of desire they generated within a more complex account of the scandalous emotional history of the central players. The first section of this chapter will examine the representation of Jane that emerges in Rossetti sources and narratives, ranging from Victorian observers through to twentieth-century biographies. While, as will be shown, these texts do not always agree on their interpretation of this relationship, one assumption widely prevails: namely, that the intensity and authenticity of Rossetti’s love was beyond doubt while Jane Morris’s feelings remain an open or unresolvable question. As a consequence of these assumptions, Gabriel’s emotional and artistic struggles are foregrounded at the expense of Jane’s agency which, if acknowledged at all, is depicted negatively: she tends to be represented either as the passive recipient of his devotion or as consciously manipulating his affections (and Morris’s, for that matter). The second part of this chapter will then consider Jane’s later relationship with Blunt where a more extensive archival record provides an invaluable resource for examining the representation – and self-presentation – of Jane Morris’s emotional agency. The archival traces of the Blunt affair attest to Jane’s self-awareness of her role as an

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 23

18/03/2013 15:50

24

Jane Morris

object of exchange and the significance of the homosocial connections between the men in her life.

‘The lady I spoke about’: Jane and Gabriel Although Lisa Tickner has observed that ‘Each age gets – or makes – the Rossetti it desires’ (2003: 72), the Rossetti that consistently emerges from many accounts of the Jane-Gabriel relationship, as ‘one of the great tragic figures of literature, one of the great lovers’ (Caine 1928: 204) whose ‘faults were the faults of passion’ (Benson 1904: 56), points to an enduring assumption about the significance of romantic love as the inspiration behind great art and poetry. Such a tragic image of Rossetti has typically left little space for any positive depiction of Jane, or even one that sees her as an equal partner in the relationship. Doughty’s biography of Rossetti, for example – the first to categorically name Jane Morris as the object of his affections (Fredeman 1970–1: 97) – devoted chapters to the impact of Rossetti’s relationship with Jane on his art and state of mind, including detailed analysis of the ‘evidence’ provided by the sonnets of 1871 inspired by the retreat of Jane and Gabriel to Kelmscott Manor (1949: 533). It is only in the concluding paragraphs of the account of the Kelmscott years, however, that Doughty finally asks: ‘And what part did Janey play in all this?’ (1949: 567). Almost an afterthought, the woman presented as integral to the epoch of Rossetti’s greatest happiness and achievement – after which, according to Doughty, Rossetti’s ‘life in the truest sense was over’ and only ‘its melancholy epilogue remained’ (1949: 568) – is a shadowy presence throughout. She comes and goes from Rossetti’s life for reasons largely unexplored, peripheral to the focus on the tortured artist even as she apparently inspires his greatest work and his greatest sense of loss. There is no doubt that the lack of source material is a contributing factor here; for all the prevarications, half-truths and reluctant disclosures, far more documentation of Gabriel’s feelings than Jane’s remain available for scholarly scrutiny. Nevertheless, the contradiction between an insistence on the powerful muse as the inspiration for Rossetti’s greatest work and the lack of curiosity about the woman herself is a striking feature in much of the Rossetti biographical tradition. In this section, my aim is not to analyse the relationship between Jane and Gabriel in its entirety but rather to focus on the depictions of Jane Morris that emerged in the Rossetti biographical tradition and the source material on which it has relied.7 In the twentieth-century biographical tradition, I argue, Jane Morris has been marginalised from

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 24

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

25

an active role in the story even though the ‘secret’ of sexuality is often portrayed as the cause of both Rossetti’s suffering and his art, thus entwining the image of Rossetti the lover with the ‘pathological Rossetti’ (Angeli 1949: 226; see also Fredeman 1970–1: 92). Of course, in the early accounts of Rossetti’s life and work that appeared following his death in 1882, the controversial topics of Gabriel’s suicidal breakdown in 1872 and his sexual liaisons were studiously avoided. Jane Morris, for instance, was not even mentioned in the works by Sharp (1882), Tirebuck (1882), Knight (1887), Stephens (1894), Benson (1904) and Dunn (1904), an indication not only of the discretion with which the biographical subject’s private life was treated but the lack of importance accorded to modelling within artists’ biographies.8 In his first edition of Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hall Caine, Rossetti’s assistant who lived at the artist’s Chelsea home in the final year of Rossetti’s life, avoided controversy by referring to Jane only elliptically as a ‘wellknown friend’ who modelled frequently for the artist (1882: 50). A similar discretion was evident in memoirs recounting friendship with Rossetti. T. G. Hake, the physician (and poet) closely involved in caring for Rossetti in 1872, confided: ‘friends are bad biographers, because they know too much and cannot shape the character to that ideal which those personally unknown to a great poet might expect’ (1892: 212). Knowing too much, which Hake sees as much a literary problem (‘cannot shape the character’) as an ethical one, persistently troubled these early memorialists even as they disclosed that they knew more than they chose to share with their readers.9 The influence of William Michael Rossetti on the sustained and collective silence concerning Jane in the years immediately following Gabriel’s death was considerable but it was also he, more than any other writer on Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who linked Jane’s name with the painter-poet. Indeed, it was unavoidable that he do so, not so much in the interests of biographical veracity but as part of his larger purpose to establish his brother’s reputation of artistic achievement. In 1895, for instance, William Michael described Jane as ‘a face created to fire [Gabriel’s] imagination and to quicken his powers’ (vol. 1, 1895: 244, emphasis added), a turn of phrase that rendered Jane Morris almost indispensable to Rossetti’s creativity. William Michael could not leave Jane Morris out of his brother’s story because she provided the best evidence for his artistry: If Rossetti had done nothing else in painting (and some people seem to suppose, most erroneously, that he did little else) except the ideal, and also very real, transcription of this unique type of female beauty, he might still,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 25

18/03/2013 15:50

26

Jane Morris

on that ground alone, survive in the chronicles of the art. (vol. 1, 1895: 200, original emphasis)

Jane’s ‘unique’ beauty thus becomes essential to prove Gabriel’s genius even though this requires William Michael to describe Jane’s singularity, a task that could come dangerously close to hinting at her special status in his brother’s life as well as his art. Something of William Michael’s dilemma may been seen in Some Reminiscences, published in 1906, where, in one chapter, he described the families of the famous with whom he had become acquainted through his association with the Pre-Raphaelites. Of Georgiana BurneJones, for instance, he noted: ‘A lady more agreeable to know than Lady Burne-Jones would not be easy to find – one more frank, cordial, spirited, and clever’ (vol. 1, 1906: 229). When he turned to Jane Morris, however, he adopted a very different approach. ‘As for Mrs Morris,’ he began, any one who wants to form an idea of the splendid and strictly exceptional beauty of this lady in her prime should look at one or two of the numerous heads painted from her by Dante Rossetti. People have an idea that portraits done by him, and still more the ideal heads, are absurdly exaggerated, and quite unlike the originals. This is a mistake. In both classes of work many of the heads are true likenesses, which I may say emphatically of most of those painted or drawn from Mrs Morris. (vol. 1, 1906: 230)

The discrepancy here between the depiction of Georgiana Burne-Jones’ character and Jane Morris’s appearance is striking. Mrs Morris lacks any ascribed interiority, with a notable absence of warmth on the part of the reminiscing narrator. In a chapter supposedly devoted to domestic and social relationships, Jane Morris’s ambiguous status is revealed through being discussed entirely in terms of her special place in Gabriel’s art. Appealing to the authority of his own experience – Jane Morris really does look like Rossetti’s paintings – William Michael’s aim, like his tone, is defensive: to rebut criticism of his brother’s portraiture skills. William Michael also sought to control the disclosure of unflattering aspects of Gabriel’s life in the writings of others. He revealed, for instance, that he had prevailed upon Hall Caine to cut ‘two or three passages’ from his Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1882 (vol. 2, 1906: 504). In the expanded and revised version of his Recollections published in 1928, however, Caine was no longer so discreet and provided one of the key pieces of the puzzle that had surrounded the relationship between Jane and Gabriel up to this point, although even here a certain reticence prevailed.10 Describing the semi-seclusion in which Rossetti lived at Cheyne Walk in his final years, Caine noted:

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 26

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

27

Finally, there were rare and valued visits from Mrs. William Morris, the subject of many of Rossetti’s pictures, no longer young but still wondrously beautiful, with the grand, sad face which the painter has made immortal in those three-quarter-length pictures which, for wealth of sublime and mysterious suggestion, unaided by dramatic design, are probably unique in the art of the world. I never met her. She was the only intimate friend of Rossetti whom I did not meet. As often as she came he would write a little note and send it out to me, saying: ‘The lady I spoke about has arrived and will stay with me to dinner. In these circumstances I will ask you to be good enough to dine in your own room to-night.’ Naturally, I respected to the end the sincerity of what I then believed, and still believe, to have been from first to last the most beautiful of friendships, although it deprived me of the acquaintance of the one member of his circle whom, most of all, and for more reasons than I can give, I desired to meet. (1928: 141–2)

Caine’s account of Jane and Rossetti dining alone suggests an ambiguous intimacy just as his emphatic statement, ‘I then believed, and still believe’, simultaneously raises and dispels the possibility of an affair. Such insistence can be seen as an example of ‘narrative refusal’, a ‘strategy for addressing the unnarratable’ that may operate in texts where an overt refusal of explanation becomes a form of disclosure by making the reader aware of other possibilities that threaten to undermine, if not contradict, the narrative as it is explicitly recounted (Warhol 2007: 260).11 Ostensibly describing an innocent dinner, then, Caine’s account manages to open up ‘alternative stories’ (Warhol 2007: 260) by drawing attention to Jane’s unique status in Rossetti’s life. This partial account, although veiled as a refutation of any impropriety in the relationship, in fact foreshadows the climactic disclosure that Caine later relates at some length – and which, in turn, requires significant quotation to do it justice – in which Jane is never mentioned by name but is implicitly invoked as Rossetti’s one true love. Caine recounts how, on a train journey back to London from Cumberland after a failed attempt to ‘cure’ Rossetti of his chloral addiction, Rossetti confessed to him the story of his marriage in a way that places Jane Morris at the centre of his tragic life, albeit as a structuring absence: if I had now to reconstruct his life afresh from the impressions of that night, I think it would be a far more human, more touching, more affectionate, more unselfish, more intelligible figure that would emerge than the one hitherto known to the world. It would be the figure of a man who, after engaging himself to one woman in all honour and good faith, had fallen in love with another, and then gone on to marry the first out of a mistaken sense of loyalty and a fear of giving pain, instead of stopping, as he must have done, if his will had been stronger and his heart sterner, at the door of the church itself. It would be the figure

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 27

18/03/2013 15:50

28

Jane Morris

of a man who realized that the good woman he had married was reading his secret in spite of his efforts to conceal it, and thereby losing all joy and interest in life. . . . All I knew of Rossetti, all he had told me of himself, all he had revealed to me of the troubles of his soul, all that had seemed so mysterious in the conduct of his life and the moods of his mind, became clear and intelligible, and even noble and deeply touching, in the light of his secret as I thought I read it for the first time on that journey from Cumberland to London. It lifted him entirely out of the character of the wayward, weak, uncertain, neurotic person who could put up a blank wall about his existence because his wife had died by the accident of miscalculating a dose of laudanum; who could do a grave act and afterwards repent of it and undo it; who could finally shut himself up as a hermit and encourage a hundred delusions about the world because a rival poet had resented his success. Out of all this it raised him into the place of one of the great tragic figures of literature, one of the great lovers, whose lives as well as their works speak to the depth of their love or the immensity of their remorse. It has only been with a thrill of the heart and a trembling hand that I have written this, but I have written it; and now I shall let it go to join other such incidents in literary history, because I feel that it is a true reading of the poet’s soul, and one that ennobles his memory. I wrote it all, or the substance of it all, . . . forty-six years ago, but I did not attempt to publish it then from sheer fear of lowering the temperature of reverence in which I thought Rossetti’s name ought to live. But after nearly half a century of conflicting portraiture – much of it very true, some of it very false, all of it incomplete – I feel that the truth of the poet’s life as it revealed itself to me (or as I believed it revealed itself to me) can only have the effect of deepening the admiration and affection with which the world regards him. The whole truth that hurts is better than the half truth that kills. And, speaking for myself, I can truly say that out of the memory of that terrible journey only one emotion remained, and that was a greater love than ever for the strong and passionate soul in the depths of its abased penitence. (1928: 200–5, emphasis added)

Not only does this revelation humanise Rossetti, ensuring that the painter-poet’s memory is ‘ennoble[d]’, but, by insisting on the tragic and heroic status of Rossetti, Caine protects himself from the charge of exploitation or sensationalism in his revelations of the ‘whole truth’. Jane Morris apparently explains all: the failure of Rossetti’s marriage; Elizabeth Siddall’s tragic and premature death; the shocking exhumation of the poems from her grave; Rossetti’s reaction to Buchanan’s polemical attack on his poetry, followed by his addiction and decline;12 and, of course, the measure of Rossetti’s achievement as painter and poet. And all of these aspects are contained within Caine’s depiction of Rossetti as one of the ‘great lovers’. There is, however, no place for Jane Morris’s voice in this account, just as there is no place for her name. What is important is her status as Rossetti’s secret, not her own feelings or actions.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 28

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

29

Caine’s story, then, offered an early instance of the myth of Rossetti as the tragic genius, larger than life in his failings as well as his accomplishments, but less flattering depictions of the artist also foregrounded the significance of his relationship with Jane Morris while only partially disclosing it. In the early part of the twentieth century, a certain debunking of the Rossetti myth took place, most notably through Violet Hunt’s controversial biography of Elizabeth Siddall, The Wife of Rossetti, which exposed the tragedy of Siddall’s suicide and portrayed Rossetti as ‘the first a-moral person to exist delightfully in those austere Victorian fields’ (1932: xi). Even Doughty’s magisterial biography of Rossetti in 1949 repeated ‘obviously false’ gossip concerning Jane and Gabriel (1949: 455), on the grounds that its inclusion demonstrated the significance of the illicit relationship. Doughty’s disclosure provoked the outrage of Sydney Cockerell who, in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement in 1951, accused Doughty of blurring the line between scholarly biography and scurrilous innuendo. The biographer, Cockerell charged, had been too concerned with ‘Rossetti’s weaknesses and with the elaboration of a scandal’ (1951: 533) but his letter is careful not to name this scandal. In his attempt to close down further discussion of this topic, however, Cockerell failed: not only did the letter include defence of Jane Morris as ‘one of my heroines’ but it was published under the heading ‘Rossetti and Mrs Morris’. Cockerell was not the only defender of Jane Morris who felt compelled to refute any allegation against her of an improper relationship with Rossetti, thereby keeping the issue alive. Graham Robertson, for instance, the painter and theatre designer whose memoirs described his meetings with various Victorian celebrities including Jane Morris, provided the following story in a letter in 1945 as proof that the affair had never happened: Lady B[urne]-J[ones] asked Mrs Morris straight out if this [the affair with Rossetti] were true. Mrs Morris at once replied, ‘No.’ Lady B.-J. told this to Angela [Thirkell, Georgiana’s granddaughter] and said, ‘If you ever hear this discussed, I should like you to repeat what I have told you.’ (Preston 1953: 522)

While Robertson’s letter refutes the charge of adultery he does not dispute the ‘truth’ of Rossetti’s feelings for Jane: ‘Long before his marriage he had found out who the right woman was, but knew that she was for ever out of his reach’ (Preston 1953: 459). His letter, then, raises more questions than it answers, not only about the truth of the affair but who was privy to this truth. The degree of mediation in this hearsay evidence is telling: Robertson tells his correspondent what Jane (appar-

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 29

18/03/2013 15:50

30

Jane Morris

ently) told Georgiana, what Georgiana told Angela, and – presumably – what Angela told him. Gossip is deployed, that is, to combat gossip. Georgiana’s instruction to her granddaughter – which in effect was to participate in the networks of gossip – in turn implied that there was a need to rebut such a claim. Indeed, in the same letter Robertson referred disparagingly to ‘the popular belief that Mrs. Morris and D. G. R. were lovers’ (holding Violet Hunt to blame for its continued circulation), even as he described ‘the great sympathy and attraction that [Jane] and Rossetti had for each other’ (Preston 1953: 461). Crucially, Robertson can only present a positive view of Jane – his consistent depiction of her throughout his published correspondence – if she is proved to be innocent of any improper entanglement with Rossetti.13 In spite of such demurrals, however, most depictions of the assumed affair continually emphasised Rossetti’s emotional vulnerability at Jane’s expense. Not always endowed with the tragic grandeur that Caine afforded him, Rossetti was still the devoted lover while Jane remained enigmatic, her silent passivity open to unflattering interpretation as a kind of conscious, knowing performance. This representation was strikingly consistent with that which characterised the correspondence among Rossetti’s inner circle of friends and carers during the artist’s health crisis of 1872, among whom Jane’s guilt (in more than one sense) was assumed. Although Rossetti referred to her as ‘the one necessary person’ who could enable his recovery, his carers during the summer of 1872 (including William Bell Scott, William Michael Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, the physician T. G. Hake and his son George) regarded this view as a symptom of Rossetti’s delusion and sought to limit or exclude contact between the two (see Fredeman 1970–1: 96–7). As early as 1868 – that is, the same year Scott’s letters begin to describe Rossetti’s devotion to Jane – Scott saw the Jane-Gabriel relationship as deleterious to Rossetti. Referring to Jane as ‘Lucretia Borgia’, for instance, Scott represented her as a poisonous influence: Gabriel had not tried painting, nor seen any doctor, nor seen the sweet Lucretia Borgia. I have now come to the conclusion – often when we meet a person in a new place after a few days cessation a new light breaks on one – that the greatest disturbance in his health and temper, and both are extremely different from what they were, is caused by an uncontrollable desire for the possession of the said L. B. Letitia went there on Friday to see an altar-cloth and was the first to inform her of Gabriel’s return, he having refrained from going as he understands they are watched. (PP, 4 November 1868)

Despite Rossetti’s alarming decline, however, Scott’s correspondence initially adopted a light tone concerning Gabriel’s health crisis (sharply at odds with the anxious solicitude evident in Alice Boyd’s letters in

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 30

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

31

reply). The ‘Lucretia Borgia’ passage, for instance, occurs more than two-thirds through this letter, preceded by an anecdote concerning an inebriated Gabriel who had stood on Scott’s dog’s tail (again) and been bitten (again). Scott also trivialised Rossetti’s state of mind, as when he described Gabriel ‘in the dumps, not painting on either day, but lunging about the room shouldering every thing with his hands in his pockets, because Janey was ill and unable to come’ (PP, 24 May 1869), showing a distinct lack of empathy for a friend similarly placed in an illicit relationship as he was with Alice Boyd. Scott’s letters to Boyd in the summer of 1872, however, recounted in a far more serious tone Rossetti’s decline into suicidal paranoia and the challenges this crisis presented to those responsible for him. It is in this context, in which all involved agreed on the need for secrecy concerning Rossetti’s condition, that Jane Morris was perceived as a dual threat: both to Gabriel’s recovery, and to maintaining secrecy concerning the severity of his condition. Describing Gabriel’s conspiracy delusion – that all were ‘determined to hunt him to death’ – which required his removal from London, Scott concluded: ‘let us hope that he will gradually become right again, and then we will all have to be very careful of the world knowing anything about it’ (PP, 8 June 1872, emphasis added). In her reply of 10 June, Boyd echoes Scott’s wish for secrecy: ‘We must as you say be most careful to keep this state of things quiet.’ The gossipers for once wanted to curtail communication even though, during the height of the crisis, they write so often to each other that their letters frequently cross. In mid-June, Scott informed Boyd of Jane’s reaction to the news of Gabriel’s state (William Michael, Scott reported, was now describing his brother as ‘a maniac with so many and such dreadful delusions that there seemed nothing for it but to find him an asylum’; 13 June): On Friday afternoon Janey Morris was taken down to see him [Gabriel] by her more than amiable husband and he [Gabriel] was of course thrown into a miserable state for a while, but all through the fortnight he has really alluded very little to Mrs M . . . I did not tell you that I went up to Queen’s Square on Thursday of last week, when he was getting into his worst state, to see Janey and tell her he was ill. She had expected him, and he was becoming anxious, fearing that she was in some dreadful way. I found her on the sofa, and not discomposed by my intelligence, wh[ich] was very partially indicative of the real state of things. I quieted his mind this way. Next morning he took me aside and said he had had a note with her signature, but a forgery evidently. This note was to say if he went to the country she hoped he would be able to look in first. Since then he has scarcely alluded to her. After the interview he subsided and altogether our anticipations and fears, about her rushing out to Roehampton or to Chelsea, and about his derangement being increased by thinking of her, have been entirely groundless. (PP, 16 June 1872)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 31

18/03/2013 15:50

32

Jane Morris

Scott’s depiction of Jane remains consistent with his account of her back in 1868 when he noted her ‘coolness’ in a social setting: the double negative, ‘not discomposed by my intelligence’, conveys the same implicit criticism of her lack of emotion, despite the fact that, by his own admission, he had given her only a deliberately sketchy account of Gabriel’s condition. Jane’s apparent composure could, of course, be attributed to any number of causes, such as a wariness of disclosing any personal feeling in the presence of Scott (and in letters written in June and July, she had conveyed a strong sense of her anxiety on Rossetti’s behalf). In the letters of Rossetti’s inner circle, a fear of gossip persistently linked Rossetti’s condition with Jane Morris.14 In a letter to Charles Augustus Howell, for instance, William Michael Rossetti drew an explicit connection between Gabriel’s illness and his affair: The subject [of Gabriel’s psychotic state] is too painful for me to dilate upon, and in other respects not fitted for written correspondence . . . Of course I know that he was madly in love, and can believe anything in the way of hypochondria on that account, and as concerned the state of his eyes . . . Please return the enclosed as soon as done with, and stick to your good resolution of not saying anything to anybody. (9 July 1872; Cline 1978: 136, emphasis added)

There is even at times an uncanny echoing of the patient’s conspiracy theories in the carers’ attitude to Jane Morris (just as Scott’s description of Rossetti’s paranoia about being watched failed to register that Rossetti was being closely watched, not least by Scott himself). Her presence – whether literal or virtual – they believed threatened ruin for the artist and undermined their ability to conceal Rossetti’s illness. Writing to William Michael, for instance, Dr Hake expressed deep misgivings about allowing communication between Jane and Gabriel: Your brother wrote a long letter yesterday to Mrs Morris. I have turned over every possible means of dealing with it – and concluded that it must be sent – but I have written a letter to Mrs Morris (copy enclosed) on this important matter, that any mischief may be avoided. We went on just as usual yesterday – but George says he [Gabriel] was thinking about the letter during his walk – and on waking this morning he spoke unpleasantly about the conspiracy the first time this fortnight. (13 August 1872, AD)

Given the elaborate arrangements described by his carers, it is hardly surprising that Rossetti ‘spoke unpleasantly’ about conspiracy and may say more about the artist’s regaining of mental powers than the opposite. Nevertheless, Jane duly followed Dr Hake’s instructions on how to reply to Gabriel’s letter, writing to William Michael on 15 August:

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 32

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

33

I am writing to you at Dr Hake’s request to tell you what I think of Gabriel’s letter – it showed no sign whatever of his late distressing illness, no one could have told he had been ill. I am quite hopeful about him now . . . I must tell you too that his letter was not of a gloomy kind. I have had many from his hand of a far more depressing kind. (AD)

Her eagerness to dispel a brother’s anxiety and the assurance with which she writes concerning her intimacy with Gabriel does not correspond to the carers’ image of Jane as a source of ‘mischief’ but the close monitoring, appropriation, and circulation of Jane’s letters continued all the same. Throughout the correspondence relating to Rossetti’s illness, fears are expressed concerning both the content of letters (what is Rossetti writing? what are others writing to or about him?) and their materiality (who possesses these letters? are they safe from wider circulation?). The line between privacy and property, not to mention scandal and scholarship, is often blurred in matters epistolary (Jolly 2009: 34). The uncontrollable afterlife of correspondence is perhaps nowhere more clearly demonstrated than in the bundle of letters concerning Gabriel’s breakdown, wrapped in a paper cover on which Scott had written ‘To be destroyed’, which William Fredeman discovered in the attic of Penkill Castle in 1963, apparently untouched since Alice Boyd’s death in 1897 (Fredeman 2003: 220–1). In Rossetti’s recovery process, however, letters were also significant as a sign of both renewed health and relationships. By late August 1872, Dr Hake wrote to Scott that Gabriel ‘has now got into regular correspondence with his brother, sister Christina, and Mrs Morris’, a symbolic indication both of Gabriel’s improved state and of Jane’s privileged position of intimacy, a position further enhanced by Rossetti’s return to Kelmscott Manor in September, where Jane and Gabriel were often together.15 By the end of the crisis, Scott’s attitude to Jane remained unchanged from the beginning: neither her restrained behaviour throughout, nor his good friend’s continuing attachment to her had made any impact on his evaluation of her as detached or untrustworthy. Rossetti’s decisive return to health at Kelmscott seems to have been attributed to location, rather than company. The textual traces of Jane’s feelings during the 1872 crisis, however, are scant but her compliance with the parameters of letter-writing recommended by Dr Hake may account at least in part for this gap in the records. Writing much later to Theodore Watts-Dunton after Rossetti’s death, Jane stated unequivocally: ‘That Gabriel was mad was but too true, no one knows that better than myself’ (BL, Add 4535, original emphasis). Two letters written to Jane by Philip Webb in September 1872, prior to Rossetti’s convalescent return to Kelmscott, provide some

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 33

18/03/2013 15:50

34

Jane Morris

further insight. Dated 7 and 12 September, Webb’s letters suggest Jane had initiated this exchange of correspondence and confided in Webb as never before. ‘I was very glad to have your letter,’ Webb wrote, because it was written without my asking for it – and I very much wish to have your confidence in my sympathy (if you think it would be worth anything) . . . Of course I know the strength of resource in despair, well enough. That is, the willingly cutting oneself off from the help of any one, so as to avoid the risk of being deserted by them . . . (BL, Add 45342)

Webb implies disciplined stoicism on Jane’s part, as well as a pre-emptive strategy of self-protection (‘so as to avoid the risk of being deserted’) to mask a very real vulnerability. In his second letter, Webb thanked Jane for her ‘simple and straightforward’ reply, assuring her ‘I do not think I misunderstood your former letter, for I had no idea that you would think it worthwhile to tell me a lie, any more than I would really lie to you’ (BL, Add. 45342). What had Jane thought Webb may have misunderstood or construed as a lie? In a later chapter, I will discuss another epistolary exchange between Jane and Webb where misunderstanding arose from painful disclosures, suggesting a pattern of correspondence between the two in which the expression of intimacy involved a fraught process of (partial) self-presentation. The precariousness of the exchange of intimacy, the ease with which misunderstanding could arise, the difficulty of truthful expression – either through circumspection or through intensity of feeling – are all poignantly conveyed in Webb’s reply. In this letter, Webb again reassured Jane of his friendship and concern for her: I have always taken a great interest in you, and none the less that time has tossed us all about, and made us play other parts than we set out upon. I see that you play yours, well & truly under the changes, and I feel deeply sympathetic on that account. (BL, Add. 45342)

While Scott attributed a shrewd calculation to Jane’s performance of social identity, Webb’s image of ‘play[ing] other parts than we set out upon’ is a more compassionate response to what he saw as the shared vicissitudes of life in which duties, loyalties and intimacies shift and change. At the same time, Webb almost seems to discourage any further confidences: ‘Please believe that I in no way wish to penetrate into sorrows wh[ich] I can in no way relieve’ (BL, Add. 45342). Does the strength of this statement, with its repetition of ‘no way’, signal Webb’s discomfort with the intimacy resulting from Jane’s disclosures? Or does it merely express a sense of his own inadequacy to offer any kind of solution to the emotional distress of a friend? The endurance of the friendship between Jane Morris and Philip Webb, marked by the archive

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 34

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

35

of Webb’s letters still in existence, suggests the latter. The fact that Webb’s sympathy for Jane coexisted with his lifelong friendship with William Morris further suggests that his perspective reflected a more nuanced understanding of this complex configuration of relationships than Scott’s often snide dismissal of the feelings of others conveyed. Whether Jane’s ‘sorrows’ diminished or persisted with Rossetti’s return to Kelmscott in autumn 1872 remains unclear. The rather strange account of this time provided in May Morris’s Introductions to her father’s Collected Works emphasised Rossetti’s melancholy solitariness and a child’s compassion for him (vol. VIII, 1911: xxvi). It is an account strikingly at odds with May’s more frequent descriptions of life at Kelmscott Manor as an idyllic space of social ease. Do May’s recollections merely signal a child’s sense of something amiss in the household or mark a diplomatic attempt to insist there was a decorous distance between Rossetti and her mother? Wilfrid Blunt would later report in his diary that Jane Morris told him she had broken the relationship with Rossetti in 1876 – that is, considerably after the crisis of 1872 – when she became aware of the full extent of his chloral addiction and refused his urging to leave her marriage and children. While Blunt’s account cannot simply be taken at face value as a verbatim report (as the following section will examine more extensively), what emerges from Blunt’s version of Jane’s disclosure is not only the endurance of Rossetti’s attachment to Jane but her refusal to be defined within a therapeutic dynamic, to accept a role as the lover’s cure: ‘I was the only person, she said, besides Theodore Watts who had any influence over him, but I [could] not prevent him from killing himself with chloral. I found out how much he took of this in 1876 when I was staying with him in the country . . . I found he [would] take a whole bottle in a day – a pint or even a quart. He had a wonderful constitution to stand it as long as he did. He had no excuse for taking it. He was in perfect health, but he had incurable melancholia – at one time amounting to suicidal mania. He often promised me to give it up, but he [could] not. When I was staying with him in 1876, May (her daughter) was with me & he wanted me to go away with him altogether, to leave my children & everything. But you know I [could] not do that. He said I [could] cure him, but I [should] not have been able to do it. After that he lived very much alone & I did not see him. I cannot help thinking he must have been always partly mad.’ (FM, Diaries, 1885: 15–17)

While Blunt does not always show Jane Morris in a flattering light – highlighting, for instance, her lingering passion for him after he has lost interest in the affair – here he offers an image of startlingly modern self-possession, a woman with a sense of her own emotional agency in intimate relationships.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 35

18/03/2013 15:50

36

Jane Morris

One final glimpse of Jane’s feelings can be deduced from a letter of condolence she wrote to Alice Boyd after the death of William Bell Scott in 1890 (that is, after Rossetti’s death but before Morris’s), which hints at more than a formulaic expression of sympathy: My dear Miss Boyd, I was much grieved to hear of the death of dear Mr Scott, I know but too well that no words at such a time can lessen your grief, but I cannot resist sending this brief note to show that you are in my thoughts. I am thankful to learn that there was no increase of suffering at the last. Yours always affectionately, Jane Morris. (PP, emphasis added)

Jane’s empathy here seems to allude to a parallel experience: the loss of a beloved by one who has not the legal entitlement to the status of widow and must endure her grief privately. As is so often the case with Jane Morris’s remaining letters, however, there is no conclusive disclosure, attesting to the care with which social conventions of correspondence were observed and, at this distance, it is impossible to know to what extent her correspondents read such letters as formal observances or more subtle disclosures of feeling. Ever since Scott, then, Jane Morris’s lack of self-disclosure – or, at least, the limited archival traces of such disclosure – has worked to her disadvantage in the eyes of many who have sought to interpret her composed exterior. In particular, this quality has coloured depictions of the relationship that existed between Jane and Gabriel. In her revealinglytitled study of 1949, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies, Helen Rossetti Angeli concluded (if that is the right word for the prevarication expressed): In approaching Mrs Morris in her relations to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, certainty and knowledge of facts are left behind and we enter a region of speculation. It is however clear that Rossetti was at one time deeply in love with Jane Morris and the presumption is that, in some degree, she reciprocated this love. She certainly did not repel it . . . If there was a secret and tragic passion between Rossetti and Jane Morris the secret was well kept. Gabriel’s brother never hints at it, and Madox Brown held his peace. (1949: 209–10)

As in so many accounts, Rossetti’s feelings are proclaimed as indisputable, Jane’s impenetrable. The 1964 lifting of the embargo on Gabriel’s correspondence with Jane was supposed to remove all doubt about the nature and extent of the relationship but the significant gaps in the British Library correspondence (none from May 1868 till July 1869, nor from 1870 to 1877) are telling and the ‘long-awaited’ letters turned out to be far less unequivocal than hoped (Grylls 1964b: 96). Despite

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 36

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

37

noting the significance of the material existence of these letters (‘Only the fact that Janey kept them points to the preciousness of the memories that they enshrined for her’), Grylls concluded that the letters ‘answer none of our questions. More important, there remain Rossetti’s sonnets and his pictures for which Jane Morris was the model’ (1964b: 96).16 Similarly unenlightened, Briggs wrote: ‘The nature of Janey’s stimulus for Rossetti is a mystery which [Rossetti’s] letters do nothing to solve’ (1964: 22). In the absence of unambiguous declarations on Jane’s part, scholars have sometimes tended to read the correspondence too literally. Briggs, for instance, concluded: There is nothing in the present letters, if indeed anything exists or ever existed, to suggest that Rossetti was responsible for that loss [of Jane’s affection for her husband]. Nor do they in the least invalidate Mr E. P. Thompson’s suggestion that Janey’s strange passivity and melancholy self-absorption was what caused the failure of the marriage. (1964: 21)

How Briggs can draw this conclusion is puzzling: is it likely that Rossetti would present himself in these letters as the cause of the Morrises’ estrangement? Even if it is conceivable that some expression of guilt or regret may have been committed to paper, the absence of correspondence from 1868 could account for such archival silence on this topic. The circumspection of the remaining correspondence gives all the signs of judicious selection (and destruction17). Further, Rossetti’s often obsessive concern with Jane’s health in his letters are taken as proof of her temperament rather than his. Like all texts, letters construct an implied reader and remind us of the constructed nature of social relationships, the conventions on which people draw even to discuss or enact their most intimate feelings. The Jane Morris that appears in Rossetti’s letters in this collection is, by turns, practical, solicitous, unwell, curious, intelligent, serious and frivolous. Addressed variously as ‘Funny sweet Janey’, ‘Dearest kindest Janey’, ‘Dear suffering Janey’, but most often simply as ‘My dear Janey’, she cannot be reduced to a single image of ‘strange passivity and melancholy self-absorption’ and to do so would of course render it mysterious that Rossetti could have harboured intense feelings for such a woman for so long. A more nuanced reading of the remaining letters may discern much in their apparent simplicity, such as when Rossetti writes: ‘For the last two years, I have felt distinctly the clearing away of the chilling numbness that surrounded me in the utter want of you’ (31 January 1870; Fredeman vol. IV, 2004: 358); or ‘No one else seems alive at all to me now, and places that are empty of you are empty of all life’ (4 February

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 37

18/03/2013 15:50

38

Jane Morris

1870; Fredeman vol. IV, 2004: 362).18 Such statements may not provide the details of ‘intimacies exchanged or private experiences shared’ (Fredeman 1970–1: 95) but they powerfully articulate the desire for another’s presence. Too often, however, scholars have not been content to admit the limitations of available sources and have instead resorted to the truism of feminine culpability or fickleness to complete the picture. David Sonstroem, in his study of Rossetti’s sonnets, Rossetti and the Fair Lady, is perhaps the most extreme example of this point of view. ‘When we recall,’ he writes, ‘the many partings and reunions in the course of their romance – changes probably instigated by the unstable and self-centred Janey – we can imagine how often Rossetti had to tailor his fantasies of his fate to reconcile them to Janey’s latest mood’ (1970: 149, emphasis added). Faced with a predominantly one-sided correspondence (from Rossetti to Jane), Sonstroem relies on the literary tropes of the femme fatale to frame his biographical interpretation of Rossetti’s poetry: ‘During the time of Rossetti’s greatest involvement with Jane Morris, he produced more works describing femmes fatales than at any other time of his life. Several considerations point to her as the source of inspiration’ (1970: 155–6). What is perhaps most striking in Sonstroem’s account is the ascription of power and agency to Jane: it is her instability and egotism that dictates the poet’s response and directs the relationship on her terms, although Rossetti gallantly deflected any blame from Jane: ‘Fate’s role in these sonnets may be so large partly because he wished to attribute Janey’s flights to something other than her own volition’ (1970: 150). The literary trope of the male lover, helpless in the face of overwhelming desire for the beloved, is read as a literal account of Rossetti’s circumstances. The bulk of the remaining correspondence between Jane and Gabriel derives from the later years of the relationship and is characterised by an easy and equitable companionship that has tended to be more positively depicted by subsequent biographers and critics but has also led to divergent opinions as to whether the relationship was ever sexual in deed as well as in sentiment. In fact, the ‘did they or didn’t they?’ question has rather preoccupied scholars. As Fredeman noted with dismay: ‘biographers have always assumed the worst – or the obvious – and then sought justification in the poetry or painting’ or ‘by reading between lines of available correspondence’ (1970–1: 96).19 Grylls, while insisting that ‘far too much can be made of sexual relations’ (1964a: 151), concluded: ‘The correspondence, 1878–81, is like that between a long-married couple, or two people who have shared a love-affair in the past which, to their regret, was never consummated’ (1964a: 238). The key letter in this scholarly discussion is that of 31 May 1878, often seen as proof that

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 38

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

39

sex never occurred between the two. In this letter, Rossetti proclaimed ‘a feeling far deeper (though I know you have never believed me) than I have entertained towards any other living creature at any time of my life. Would that circumstances had given me the power to prove this: for proved it wd have been’ (Bryson 1976: 68). In a subsequent letter, however, Rossetti repeated the charge that Jane always doubted his feelings, offering as proof one of his sonnets: The deep-seated basis of feeling, as expressed in that sonnet,20 is as fresh and unchanged in me towards you as ever, though all else is withered and gone. This you wd never believe, but if life and fate had willed to link us together you wd have found true what you cannot think to be truth when – alas! – untried. (Bryson 1976: 165–6)

The continuities implied here – not only the constancy of Gabriel’s feelings but of Jane’s insecurity regarding them – would seem to reflect the necessarily precarious nature of a relationship outside the bounds of convention. Such sentiments also project an image of the lover’s constancy that may have been more appealing as a self-image for Rossetti than the complicated prevarication that had characterised his attachment to Elizabeth Siddall, among others. For some biographers, the conclusive piece of evidence concerning the Jane-Gabriel relationship was physiological. Marsh and Simons are not alone in deducing that Rossetti’s troublesome hydrocele would have prevented sexual relations and in interpreting the intense sensuality of Rossetti’s poetry during this time as a reflection of the absence rather than the actuality of a sexual relationship with Jane (Marsh 1999: 351; Simons 2008: 117). The ‘clinching’ argument for the view that Jane and Gabriel never technically committed adultery, however, comes from Blunt, the man who succeeded Rossetti in Jane’s affections. In his diary in August 1891, Blunt recorded a visit to Kelmscott concluding: ‘We slept together, Mrs M and I, and she told me things about the past which explain much in regard to Rossetti. “I never quite gave myself,” she said, “as I do now”’ (Faulkner 1986: 30). Setting aside for the moment the question of the accuracy of Blunt’s account, it is worth bearing in mind that Rossetti’s history with Jane Morris repeatedly provides the frame of reference for Blunt’s depiction of his own liaison with Jane in his Secret Memoirs. Jane’s reported disclosure that she never gave herself to Rossetti the way she did to Blunt, then, allowed Blunt to portray his affair with Jane Morris as a means of establishing his superiority over the ‘greatest poetical mind of our generation’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 202).21 I want to suggest, however, that interpreting Blunt’s statement as an admission that Jane and Gabriel never sexually consummated their

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 39

18/03/2013 15:50

40

Jane Morris

relationship may be too simplistic an interpretation. To understand the giving of oneself as signifying sexual surrender is one, but not the only, connotation of this phrase. The bedroom setting in which Blunt locates this exchange certainly strengthens a sexual interpretation of Jane Morris’s comment but it does not preclude a consideration of the wider senses in which a woman may give herself. As Gayle Rubin noted in her essay ‘The Traffic in Women’: If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage . . . If women are for men to dispose of, they are in no position to give themselves away. (2006: 93)

Too much emphasis has been placed, in previous interpretations, on what is imagined to constitute the act of giving, rather than the giver herself or what she may have signified by the phrase. If we assume that Jane Morris did in fact say these words – impossible to ascertain of course – then we might also see a further dimension to this statement, one that exceeds the preferred reading that Blunt implies and suggests a degree of self-awareness of her status as an object of exchange between men. To give one’s self requires, first of all, an understanding of self as simultaneously object and subject – the self that gives and the self that is given (see Steedman 1987: 68) – and, together with the careful qualification Blunt attributes to Jane (‘never quite gave myself’), allows for an interpretation of a woman knowingly cultivating a form of agency, a sense of self-possession we might say, through the limited means available to her. While Rubin argues that, within a kinship system premised on the ‘traffic in women’, ‘women are in no position to realize the benefits of their own circulation’ (2006: 93), Jane Morris’s statement suggests a different perspective. Even as she understands her role as a conduit of relationships between men – Blunt, Rossetti, and Morris – the statement ‘I give myself’ is a performative utterance that claims a self who has the power to perform this transaction, who simultaneously enacts and refuses the objectification that is the grounds of this exchange between men. Such an utterance does not necessarily preclude an emotional, even passionate, attachment within the acknowledged limitations of the context but it perhaps separates the ‘now’ of the statement from an earlier self whose consent to previous transactions – as wife, as lover – was differently informed and constrained. If she ‘never quite gave herself . . . as I do now’, that is, it may be because the self who ‘now’ gives is an older, more knowing self than the Jane Burden of the 1850s, or even the Jane Morris of the 1860s. As the following section will discuss, the Jane Morris who emerges from the documents associated with Wilfrid

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 40

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

41

Blunt presents a complicated picture of a woman well aware that she was refracted through the imagery and desires of others.

‘In thy shut lips what secrets!’: Jane and Wilfrid Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, described in the Dictionary of National Biography as a ‘hedonist, poet, and breeder of horses’, was also an anti-imperialist, Home Rule campaigner and unsuccessful parliamentary candidate during a long and eventful life. After his marriage to Lady Anne King (Byron’s granddaughter) in 1869, Blunt’s lovers included Margot Asquith, Lady Blanche Hozier and Lady Gregory, as disclosed in his multi-volumed Secret Memoirs.22 In this section, I will juxtapose the Secret Memoirs (and the diaries on which they were based) with Jane’s letters to Blunt in order to consider how his representation of Jane has contributed to the perpetuation of the myth surrounding her and how Jane’s letters challenge or complicate this image. For Blunt, Jane Morris provided a powerful means of connection with both Rossetti and William Morris; in effect, Blunt’s relationship with Jane was a triangular one, or rather two overlapping triangles, one comprised of Blunt, Jane and William Morris, and the other of Blunt, Jane and the dead Rossetti. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985) has famously argued, in such triangular relationships comprised of two men and one woman, the homosocial bond between men is privileged and reinforced through the woman’s position as valued object of exchange as much as the (shared) object of desire. The fact that Blunt never met Rossetti seemed in no way to decrease the importance of Rossetti’s role in the affair (‘She attracts me . . . perhaps on acct. of Rossetti’, he frankly observed; FM, Diaries, 18 January 1886: 22) and may even be said to have heightened his significance: a dead rival can never be entirely surpassed although he may be replaced. In Blunt’s Secret Memoirs, I argue, Jane Morris was thus a means to an end; her body symbolically operated as a conduit to a quasi-mystical exchange with Rossetti. Introduced to Jane Morris at Naworth, the home of George and Rosalind Howard in 1883, Blunt recorded the way his early impressions of Jane were shaped both by the echoes of Rossetti’s art (despite the signs of aging he noted in her appearance) and the knowledge of her back story that he had learned from others: [Mrs Morris] must have been a charming woman ten years ago when Rossetti loved her & still has the unmistakable face & eyes & hands he so often drew. But her ripply hair is getting white & her lips have become a very broken bow. She was of no very distinguished origin & was first discovered by

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 41

18/03/2013 15:50

42

Jane Morris

Rossetti & Morris as they were walking in the street & solicited as a model. Morris married her & educated her, but she loved Rossetti, after her marriage, I believe, for some years. She parted from him at last, Mrs Howard tells me, out of high principle & I fancy also Morris came to know of it for he ‘behaved very well’. Rossetti however did not forgive it, and took to promiscuous vice & at last to opium. His end was tragical. I know these details not from Mrs Morris but from Mrs Howard & John Pollen (& Minny) who knew them all well. Last year at Naworth I talked to Mrs Morris [about] Rossetti & she was evidently pleased & so began our intimacy such as it is. (FM, Diaries, March–September 1884: 69–70)

As this fragment strewn with factual errors makes clear, Jane Morris was inseparable from the stories surrounding her; her mythic status preceded her, derived from the famous men connected with her ‘discovery’ and flamed by the circulation of gossip. That Jane Morris was never a profound attachment for Blunt is also evident from this entry, with its almost offhand reference to ‘our intimacy such as it is’ and its slightly dismissive retrospective construction. In the Secret Memoirs, Blunt’s exploits have clearly been transcribed with an eye to some kind of imagined audience for whom he envisages his romantic history will be of enduring interest and which therefore required the explanation not only of his own motives and feelings but the significance of the women with whom he was involved. A recurring feature of Blunt’s Memoirs is the intertwined narratives of his affairs, as new attractions begin before he has disentangled himself from previous liaisons, and he often maintained long associations with past loves that blurred the lines between friendship and infidelity. Blunt’s attention to Jane Morris in his diaries is, however, in marked contrast to the impassioned accounts of other liaisons – notably that with Margaret Talbot, which overlapped with his affair with Jane Morris and which constitutes one of the most compelling episodes in Blunt’s story, characterised by secret assignations and threatened discovery before a rendezvous in Paris where, Blunt writes, the romance ‘was fully consummated’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIII: 288). Further, in a bizarre parallel with his relationship with Jane Morris, Blunt’s diary also recorded a short-lived but intense infatuation with Marie Spartali Stillman, another favourite model of Rossetti’s, during Blunt’s visits to Rome in 1889 and 1891 (and in the midst of his relationship with Jane Morris). Marie Spartali Stillman inspired rhapsodic descriptions in Blunt’s diary in a way that Jane Morris did not, despite the fact that the relationship never progressed beyond private conversations and a kiss or two, according to Blunt.23 While Blunt often provided an almost inventory-like description of Jane Morris’s features, he tends to spiritualise Spartali Stillman’s qualities, making a virtue of her refusal

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 42

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

43

to consent to a sexual relationship as heightening the intensity of his fervour: She is absolutely and entirely unlike anyone I have ever loved before. There is nothing material here to love. I hardly desire her more than one might desire a spirit but her eyes inspire me, her voice thrills me to my bones and the touch of her hand is like an electric current. If this is not love I know not what love is – it is more than love, it is an enchantment, for I think of her all day and night except when exorcised by the company of holy men. It is agreed that we are to correspond during the winter but beyond this nothing. (2 December 1889, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIII: 212)

Like Jane Morris, the secret of Marie’s appeal was her connection with Rossetti; she thus provided a valuable source of intimate information for Blunt concerning Rossetti’s life: Rossetti must have loved [Marie]. She told me he corresponded with her once when she was at Florence and that his letters were full of wit and fun. She burnt them, foolish woman. She has given me two volumes of his poems to read, the edition of 1887. (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 200, original emphasis)

Blunt’s certainty that his own feelings must have been echoed by Rossetti gives some sense of the extent to which he identified with the poet and it is not coincidental that Blunt’s flirtation with Marie in Rome occurred while he was re-immersing himself in Rossetti’s poetry. On 21 November, Blunt recorded: I have been reading Rossetti all the last twenty four hours and am more than ever certain of his greatness as a poet . . . At his best he stands only after Shakespeare in thought and diction. I place him distinctly as the greatest poetical mind of our generation – his sonnets will live for ever for they are absolutely the best in the English or any other language. (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 200–2)

The following day (‘A day to be remembered’), Blunt described the influence of Rossetti in an almost homoerotically charged image: ‘I went still saturated with Rossetti to the Stillmans and after luncheon she and I drove to the Vatican in an open fly with a white horse (omen of fortune). We talked of Rossetti as we went’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 202). Blunt’s Secret Memoirs, then, enacted a kind of ‘hyper-remembering, a process of obsessive recollection’ (Clewell 2004: 44) which replaces the loved, lost other – if that is the right term for someone never known in life – with an imaginary presence, through seeking women closely associated with Rossetti. By re-enacting the emotional involvements with these women that he attributed to Rossetti, Blunt constructed himself

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 43

18/03/2013 15:50

44

Jane Morris

as a worthy successor of Rossetti who, significantly, he valued as a poet (like himself) rather than a painter. After their meeting in 1883, Blunt initially reported various meetings with Jane Morris with a rather detached scrutiny that did not indicate a spontaneous or deeply-felt attraction. Accompanying her to the Royal Academy in 1884, for instance, Blunt recorded: I cannot make up my mind about Mrs Morris, whether she is really clever or not. I watched her closely and I don’t think she knows anything about painting but I like her whether or not, her connection with Rossetti makes her very attractive to me. (7 May, FM, Indian Memoirs, vol. III: 56)

In fact, Blunt’s growing interest in Jane Morris takes at times a rather ghoulish tone: ‘she received me in a room hung with pictures of her by Rossetti – hung with ghosts’, he wrote (7 July 1884, FM, Diaries: 102), repeating similar imagery in a later entry: ‘Walked with Mrs Morris in Heathy Ground where we had a curious conversation, the ghost of Rossetti following us as we walked’ (18 July 1884, FM, Diaries: 102). Curiously, while Jane is associated with death, Blunt reports feeling reinvigorated by his contact with her: Mrs Morris interests me like a person risen from the dead. Rossetti was her lover but she gave him up on principle and of course regrets it. Now she is in the third age of woman. If we had met ten years ago it would have been more interesting still . . . These past four days have been like a return to my old life. (19 July 1884, FM, Diaries: 111)

Ten years earlier, of course, Blunt’s attentions to Jane would have overlapped with Rossetti’s: would the greater interest Blunt refers to here have arisen from the opportunity to compete with Rossetti for Jane? Or simply from Jane’s increased attractiveness when she was ten years younger? It is almost as if, in passages like this, Blunt’s identity dissolves into Rossetti’s; Rossetti may be dead but Blunt has ‘return[ed] to . . . life’ through his connection with a woman who herself is like a revenant. Towards the end of 1888, when Jane apparently disclosed to him that ‘nearly all Rossetti’s “House of Life” was written to her self, and she has the pieces in his hand-writing’, Blunt was somewhat sceptical but noted: ‘This makes both her and Rossetti still more interesting to me’ (14 November 1888, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIII: 40). By the time of Blunt’s visit to Kelmscott Manor in the summer of 1889, however, the relationship had developed into one where late-night bedroom assignations featured: Kelmscott Manor was a romantic but most uncomfortable home with all the rooms opening into each other & difficult to be alone in. The rooms below

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 44

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

45

were all passage rooms opening onto the garden, so large & so low that they were completely commanded from outside. My room was sometimes one of these, sometimes a room upstairs which also was a passage room connecting the main home with the servants quarters. The upstairs drawing room where we sat in the evenings, the tapestried chamber, was a cul-de-sac approachable only by passing through Morris’ own bedroom where he lay at night in a great square Elizabethan fourposter. Mrs Morris slept alone at the end of a short passage at the head of the staircase to the right. All was uncarpeted with floors that creaked. In the daytime with the sun streaming through the windows the old house was full of happy life, but in the darkness of the night it was a ghostly place full of strange noises where every movement was heard plainly from room to room. To me such midnight perils have always been attractive. Rossetti seemed a constant presence there, for it was there that he and Janey had had their time of love some 14 years before. And I came to identify myself with him as his admirer & successor. (FM, General Memoirs 1888–92: 58E)

Unlike Blunt’s other affairs, where the pursuit and conquest are recounted in almost salacious detail, his relationship with Jane Morris lacks narrative intensity. Here, detail is given not to the amorous scene but to the house, emphasising the ingenuity required to navigate its semi-public spaces. Of most significance in this passage, however, is the way it records that Blunt’s identification with Rossetti is now complete: not only has he inextricably linked himself with the great man through sharing both a lover and perhaps the very bed of those earlier trysts but he has also emulated Rossetti’s rivalry with his beloved’s husband, whose proximity added a further frisson to his ‘midnight perils’. In Blunt’s account both Morris and Rossetti seem more a living presence for the diarist than the woman who was the supposed object of desire; despite Blunt’s observation that ‘for me [Rossetti’s] ghost is in all the rooms’, it is Jane Morris who in this account becomes truly the ghostly presence at Kelmscott Manor (12 August 1892, FM, General Memoirs, 1888–92, 328). While Blunt’s passion for Rossetti continued unabated, his sexual interest in Jane seemed to be cooling by the latter part of 1890: ‘I spent the day yesterday with Mrs Morris, the last I fancy in a quite intimate way. She felt this and said it, and I did not contradict’, Blunt wrote (18 October 1890, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 10). The ambiguity of this statement, which obscures whether this was to be ‘the last’ such occasion due to Blunt’s inclination or other factors (and how it was that Jane ‘felt this’), also hinges on what Blunt might mean by intimacy, and is another instance of the difficulty in interpreting this affair. His continued visits both to Kelmscott House and Kelmscott Manor allowed Blunt to pay attention to Jane while also developing a friendship with

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 45

18/03/2013 15:50

46

Jane Morris

her husband. During a visit to Kelmscott Manor in September 1891, for instance, Blunt effortlessly combined the social conventions of a country-house stay with that of adulterous dalliance: ‘It was very perfect weather, and we [William and Wilfrid] did our gudgeon fishing and walks as usual and I made a little love to Mrs Morris, poor woman, for the quite last time’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 242).24 Even in his Secret Memoirs where Blunt wrote with greater frankness, the entries during 1891 described a strangely ambivalent relationship with Jane Morris, as the following entry conveys: I walked a while with Mrs Morris in her suburban garden [at Hammersmith]. Ours is a very curious25 friendship, for we have little really in common on the outside of things, and she is so silent a woman that except through the physical senses we never could have become intimate. As it is, though we have so long been on these terms, we have neither, that I can remember, ever called the other by our Christian names. I wonder whether this was so with Rossetti. The result in any case is a very excellent and worthy friendship, unbroken by a single unkind or impatient word. (7 May 1891, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 118)

An ‘excellent and worthy friendship’ in which first names are never used is hardly a description of a passionate sexual relationship and, ever eager to read an equivalence between himself and Rossetti, Blunt assumes a similar mode of relationship existed between Jane and Gabriel. From Jane’s correspondence, however, we know that she and Rossetti were on first-name terms and so her reticence with Blunt offers a contrasting image of more constrained intimacy.26 Blunt’s depiction of a sad and reserved woman may say more about the dynamics of this specific relationship and its limitations than provide an accurate character portrait of Jane Morris. Whatever the sexual dimension of the relationship, the intimacy that continued between Jane and Wilfrid was always explicitly grounded in the sharing of confidences concerning Rossetti, as in the following meeting described by Blunt: To Mrs Morris at Hammersmith and stopped a couple of hours with her in the gloomy old house. We talked about Rossetti, and I asked whether she had been very much in love with him. She said, ‘Yes, at first, but it did not last long. It was very warm while it lasted. When I found that he was ruining himself with chloral and that I could do nothing to prevent it, I left off going to him – and on account of the children.’ I said ‘I think I loved you for Rossetti’s sake. He is the one modern poet who interests me.’ ‘If you had known him,’ she said, ‘you would have loved him, and he would have loved you – all were devoted to him that knew him. He was unlike other men.’ She showed me the inside of the cabinet in the drawing room, the one painted

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 46

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

47

by Burne Jones as a wedding gift for Morris. There was a picture in it on the door panel of a woman with red hair and bright cheeks, Rossetti’s wife. It was not till long after that Rossetti’s love for herself began. (5 May 1892, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XV: 20, emphasis added)27

Blunt’s extraordinary disclosure to Jane Morris that he loved her ‘for Rossetti’s sake’ is reported here as not only accepted but endorsed by Jane and perhaps marks the true culmination of this relationship: the assurance – by one who could speak with authority – that Blunt was worthy of Rossetti’s love and that the two men would have been bound in intimate reciprocity (‘you would have loved him, and he would have loved you’). In the end, the woman functions merely to authorise and confirm the idealised if unachievable homosocial relation; she may have the final word in endorsing the men’s bond but it is ultimately their story, not hers. Significantly, Blunt’s account of this meeting concludes with his observation of another instance of a woman as object of exchange among men: the picture of Rossetti’s wife, Elizabeth Siddall, painted by Burne-Jones on an object given to Morris ‘as a wedding present’ (note, given only to William, not to William and Jane). This passage, however, also suggests that Jane Morris, too, understood that her worth was endowed by, and inextricable from, her association with Rossetti and Morris, even that she possibly – and knowingly – traded on her status as an object of exchange between men. It was she, after all, who showed Blunt the image of Elizabeth Siddall. Jane Morris has been harshly judged for her ‘susceptibility to such shallow flattery as Blunt’s’ by Marsh who described the affair as ‘not an attractive feature of [Jane’s] life story’ (2000: 191). While Blunt’s Secret Memoirs depict a predatory and patronising diarist whose charm for women remains inexplicable to modern readers,28 is it possible to form a different interpretation of Jane Morris’s role in this relationship? I want to suggest that the role of letters as valued objects of exchange – Jane’s to Blunt’s and Rossetti’s to Jane – may reveal the power relations and sexual agency in this affair in which material objects – not only letters, but poems, flowers, books and other mementoes – served as a ‘synecdoche of [women’s] historical position as objects of exchange’ (Jolly 2009: 27). It is not simply a matter of proposing that Jane Morris, in her relationship with Blunt, sought to trade on the cachet derived from her relationships with famous men. This interpretation would simply serve to re-affirm the myth of Jane Morris as a calculating femme fatale, manipulating her allure over men to enact the only agency available to her. The fluctuations in her letters to Blunt, however, between tentative self-disclosure, playful flirtation, and social assurance perhaps

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 47

18/03/2013 15:50

48

Jane Morris

indicate how she moved between roles in this ambiguous relationship. At times, Jane could adopt the position of a middle-class hostess or social acquaintance, at others she could express transgressive feelings or desires in a way to be understood by her correspondent without risking exposure by speaking too openly of an adulterous liaison. Consider, for example, an early letter from Jane to Blunt which opened with the question: ‘Will you come Tuesday and make my husband’s acquaintance?’ (July 1884, Faulkner 1986: 2), an invitation consistent with practices of social acquaintance and introductions. The letter then proceeds to thank Blunt for Jane’s recent stay at his home, Crabbet: I did enjoy my visit to Crabbet very much, but it is so many years since I have made a little visit anywhere that I felt rather shy with you. Please believe me that I enjoyed myself only too much, I am often amazed at the capacity for enjoyment still left me, and I have never felt it more strongly than in your house. I shall like to come again some day if you will have me. (Faulkner 1986: 2–3, original emphasis)

A recipient so inclined could discern an expression of feeling beyond the parameters of social convention and, indeed, in subsequent letters Jane Morris would repeat the sentiment that Blunt was a revivifying presence for her, either in person or through his poetry (‘it is re:awakening in me the old interest in such things which I had long ago thought dead within me’; Faulkner 1986: 8), echoing the metaphor of ghosts and resurrection that Blunt also used.29 Jane’s praise of Blunt’s poetry combined a conventional image of the power of literature to transport a reader’s emotions with an image of romantic love as a regenerative force, providing a trope to express what could not be articulated more openly while still allowing for the possibility of an ‘innocent’ reading of such a letter. To what extent such ambiguity reflected Jane’s uncertainty about Blunt’s reciprocity or her desire to avoid detection cannot of course be fully gauged. Jane’s expressions of affection, however, progressively became less ambiguous. By November 1888, she addressed him as ‘Caro mio’, a form of endearment that drew on a common knowledge of Italian she knew Blunt shared, as well as a conventional usage of Latin sentimentality. Her letter continued: I am writing in the hope of getting a letter from you before you leave Paris, since that is all I shall have of you for so many months. I can scarcely believe now that this room held you but a few days ago, so very far off it all seems, I wish we could meet oftener when you are in England, but I know it is simply impossible – still it is such a very great pleasure when it does happen that the sweetness remains always. I shall look forward to receiving a letter from you

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 48

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

49

sometimes, . . . the sight of your dear handwriting on the cover cheers me in a way nothing else can. (Faulkner 1986: 21)

The substitution of the letter for the person (‘all I shall have of you for so many months’) suggests the value of this correspondence to the letter writer; as a material trace of the beloved, the letter was an indexical sign that could be held, re-read, carried about, secreted, and above all invested with emotional value, despite the vagaries of the relationship itself. The following year, Jane’s letters, if elliptically, referred to the significance of Blunt’s August visit to Kelmscott (when Blunt’s diary recounted the perils of creaking floorboards): ‘I can’t write you a letter my soul is in too great a turmoil, whether it will ever calm down again Heaven only knows’ (11 August; Faulkner 1986: 32). Ten days later, she reassured Blunt of her continuing ardour: I think I have regained my usual equanimity of spirit, I am well in health but somewhat sleepless and listless. I move about in a sort of dream, as if a spell had been cast over me and the whole place. Are you sure you have brought no magic arts from Egypt, and have employed them against a poor defenceless woman? (21 August; Faulkner 1986: 32–3)

Jane’s representation of the sexual relationship with Blunt as a form of enchantment is of course a clichéd representation of a woman held in sexual thrall, powerless against her lover’s charms, and a flattering portrayal of Blunt’s sexual agency. It is also, however, a portrayal that is premised on the disparity of their social power and the mobility that this enabled. Many of Jane Morris’s letters to Blunt expressed her envy of his unlimited travels and frustration at her own domestic confinement due to health or family duties (although, as the following chapter will show, she was far from immobile herself). Blunt’s freedom of movement allowed him the liberty to conduct his romantic affairs and Jane seems to have intuited what would result from Blunt’s visit to the Stillmans in Rome in 1889. ‘As if I could leave off writing to you!’ Jane wrote in December 1889: What put such an idea into your head? It must have been a little turned through seeing so much of Mrs Stillman. So I shall think, unless you write me a particularly nice kind of letter before long – your letters give me the greatest pleasure, and cheer me when I am at the lowest pitch of mental suffering. (Faulkner 1986: 38)

In an interesting parallel to their historical situation when Rossetti would sometime use Marie Spartali – later famously described as ‘Mrs Morris for beginners’ (Robertson 1931: 95) – as a substitute model in Jane’s absence, Jane Morris here implies that Marie has again replaced

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 49

18/03/2013 15:50

50

Jane Morris

her. A letter from Blunt would serve as a guarantee of her importance to him and reassure her she had not been supplanted in his affections.30 Jane’s gift to Blunt of Rossetti’s letters marked a similarly ambiguous transaction where it was the giving and receiving of the material object – the letters – that signified the importance of the relationship between giver and recipient as much as the expression of feelings in the letters’ content. Blunt’s diary attests to his enduring interest in Rossetti’s letters, repeatedly asking women who had known the artist about their correspondence and confiding his disapproval when they failed to treat them as valuable documents (judging Marie Spartali Stillman a ‘foolish woman’ for discarding Rossetti’s letters, for instance).31 Of one such conversation with Jane, Blunt recorded: Many of his earlier letters she destroyed but she still has ten years of them – ‘love letters,’ she said, ‘and very beautiful ones.’ I urged her not to destroy them but rather to leave them to me in trust, for she said she could not leave them in any way that her husband or children could see them. She had thought sometimes of building them into a wall at Kelmscott and leaving it to fate to decide what should become of them. But she has promised now to leave them to me, ‘for there is nobody now living,’ she said, ‘who knows me as you do.’ (13 May 1890, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIII: 244)

The ‘letter as form of bodily trade’ (Jolly 2009: 26) echoes the more literal bodily exchange in the sexual dimension of the affair and Jane’s gift of these letters represents another instance of ‘giving herself’ in the form of her personal history encoded in the correspondence. Blunt depicts Jane’s gift as a material sign of their unique intimacy but it also serves as a bond that connects Blunt with Rossetti, again allowing the woman to operate as a mediator or conduit between the two men. It would, however, be almost two years after this conversation before Blunt recorded receiving the letters in November 1892: The precious packet of Rossetti’s letters has arrived with a note from Mrs Morris begging me to put them with my own papers marked ‘not to be published till 50 years after my death’ . . . There must be I should think 80 to 100 of them, treasures of inestimable value. (FM, Diaries, 12 November 1892)

If a gift is always an expression of relationship it also constructs a sense of the giver and the recipient but it is difficult to know what Jane Morris sought to convey or intended Blunt to infer from the gifts she bestowed on him, nor what she inferred from his incommensurate responses, for that matter.32 A pronounced disparity is repeatedly evident in the gift exchanges between Jane and Wilfrid: her precious Rossetti letters for the amateurish acrostic he wrote for her (quoted in full in Chapter 4) and, later, her gift of the Red House dining table

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 50

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

51

produced another ponderous verse from Blunt (‘At this fair oak table sat/Whilom he our Laureate . . .’; Blunt Papers, BL, Add 45349). Giving Rossetti’s letters away made Jane Morris more vulnerable to exposure and required investing a high level of trust in a recipient who now possessed material evidence of her marital infidelity. The gift of the table, by contrast, whatever private meaning it entailed, could be seen as more publicly explicable (and acceptable) as a sign of the known friendship between Blunt, Morris, and Philip Webb (the table’s designer). Perhaps the most poignant gift exchange between Jane and Blunt, however, concerned a seemingly insignificant flower. In his published account, My Diaries, Blunt described an innocently convivial stay with the Morrises at Kelmscott Manor in the summer of 1894 but this version omits the following, with which his original diary entry concluded: ‘I found a pansy on the floor of my room when I went to bed. But it is too late alas, and I slept soundly’ (FM, Diaries, 15 August 1894). Blunt does not elaborate but it may be inferred that the pansy was a symbolic gift from Jane Morris, a signal that Blunt would be welcome to visit her room at night, but he declined the invitation. The pansy, or heartsease, had a longstanding association with Jane Morris, deriving from her relationship with Rossetti33 and Blunt seems aware of this association, given that he had mentioned Rossetti and his connection with Kelmscott (and, by inference, with Jane) in the immediately preceding sentence in this entry.34 Blunt’s refusal of Jane’s gift marks a refusal of the giver – or at least a particular kind of relationship with the giver – although the remaining correspondence between the two suggests a friendship continued until Jane’s death. In the material traces of this relationship, then, we can read a kind of fusion of the types of relationships that Jane Morris had earlier negotiated with Morris and Rossetti. The pragmatism of her marriage, implicitly accepting her status as object of exchange, is reflected in her complicity with Blunt’s sense of her value deriving from her link with Rossetti, while the significance of the dead painter-poet in Jane’s second affair also suggests the lingering cathexis attached to Rossetti’s memory. In later years, Jane’s letters to Blunt often expressed vulnerability signalling a relation of continuing intimacy and Blunt’s diaries in these years record in turn a more empathetic appraisal of Jane’s situation than was previously evident. Despite their continuing correspondence, however, Jane Morris did not always retain the same level of trust in Blunt that she had shown by the gift of the Rossetti letters. In 1908, she repeatedly asked him to return the letters (he eventually does) and in 1913 she wrote an angry letter when she learned that Blunt had disclosed personal information to a Morris researcher (‘Why did you let that young man (a

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 51

18/03/2013 15:50

52

Jane Morris

total stranger) have any details of our visit to you ’96? . . . it vexes me to find that old friends have contributed anything to an unknown author’; 23 January 1913, WSRO). Blunt must have written a conciliatory reply as three days later Jane wrote again, in a markedly different tone: ‘There is really no harm done as to furnishing the young man with such slight material, we will think no more about it’ (WSRO). What had seemed a painful disclosure has become ‘such slight material’, a shifting response that warns us against interpreting correspondence without allowing for a fluidity of mood or perspective rather than assuming a fixity of attitude or relationship from a single instance. The extract from Landor’s poem with which this chapter opened paints a romanticised picture of a woman who glories in her status as object of desire and muse (‘This man loved me’) but what has emerged here is far from a straightforward account of a Victorian woman robbed of her agency. Jane Morris’s self-awareness as object of exchange between men complicates any simple portrait of either a proto-feminist heroine or a victim of patriarchal social structures. Of Jane Morris’s extra-marital relationships it may truly be said that if ‘sex is made silent . . . its silence [is] laden with meaning’ (Cohen 1996: 2): from William Michael Rossetti’s ambiguous references to the relationship between Jane and his brother, to the gossipy letters between Scott and Boyd, to Blunt’s Secret Memoirs, there is an inexorable will to discourse surrounding the affair. ‘In thy shut lips what secrets!’ Blunt wrote in his acrostic for Jane Morris, and, for him, her hidden past with Rossetti as much as the secret nature of their own affair seemed to have been an incitement to desire. As this chapter has shown, however, this attribution of silence may have derived as much from a failure to discern what Jane Morris articulated as from a lack of communication and the following chapter will explore this aspect of the myth in more detail.

Notes 1. The phrase is used in the versions of this story given by Crow (1934: 39), Meynell (1947: 55), Henderson (1967: 49), Marsh (2000: 24), and MacCarthy (1994: 139). Hunt’s embellished account adds the detail of Morris writing ‘with a piece of white chalk’ and ‘dust[ing] it all off’ after Jane had read it (1932: 219). Marsh goes so far as to say that Morris’s scribble constituted his proposal (2000: 24). See also Bingaman’s dissenting account (2005: 95). 2. The apocryphal nature of this story – in which even who was present varies – is made clear in Grylls’s version: ‘On another night at the theatre when Rossetti was with Morris, “Ned” and Arthur Hughes, or, some say, when

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 52

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

53

they were looking out of a window in the King’s Arms – or in church, which they sometimes attended on Sundays in their search for models – a chance encountered occurred which was to change their lives’ (1964a: 67). As Bornand notes, ‘Between 1857 and 1875, Rossetti painted or drew no less than thirty-nine portraits of Mrs William Morris’ (1977: 41, n8). On the fly-leaf of Volume XIII of the Secret Memoirs, covering the years 1888 to 1890, Blunt has written in pencil: ‘Note: No part of the diary given in this volume has as yet been published. 1912. The original diary, of which this is a copy somewhat abbreviated and taken down to my dictation by Dorothy Carleton, has been for the most part destroyed. Nothing however of any real importance has been omitted from the transcription and the cahiers giving my life in Egypt have been preserved. W.S.B.’ The role of Dorothy Carleton as in some sense an intended audience for Blunt’s Secret Memoirs through this transcription process warrants further consideration than can be given here. Dorothy Carleton, niece of the Wyndhams (of Clouds), was ‘adopted’ by Blunt as his niece and ostensibly fulfilled a kind of secretary role but she became a factor in the separation of Blunt and his wife in 1906. In 1907 Blunt described his relationship with Dorothy as ‘in everything but name a marriage’ (qtd. Longford 1979: 368) and she inherited his Newbuildings estate in Sussex on Blunt’s death in 1922. For accounts of the celebrity/notoriety of Norton and Langtry see, respectively, Poovey (1989: 51–88) and Hindson (2011). Jane Morris never attained the degree of public exposure through media coverage that William Cohen sees as constitutive of ‘modern’ scandal in which an accuser exposes a private indiscretion that is then disseminated – and denied – through the imagined community of national news media (1996: 7). How widely known was the affair among contemporaries of Jane and Gabriel remains impossible to gauge although it seems an over-statement to describe it as ‘near-public’ (Marsh 1999: 454), given the extent to which print culture was expanding into a mass medium during this era; most sections of the public would, that is, have been ignorant of such a private scandal. The two key archival sources here are Rossetti’s remaining letters to Jane, released from embargo in the British Library in 1964, and the archive of Rossetti material held by the University of British Columbia Library, particularly the Penkill Papers and the Angeli-Dennis Papers, notably associated with the work of William Fredeman (see Fredeman 2003). An exception is Marillier (1899) who mentions Jane as both model and owner of Rossetti’s works. Scott (1892), although writing his own autobiography rather than a study of Rossetti, should also be mentioned in this context. He is noteworthy for including lengthy extracts from Gabriel’s letters from Kelmscott in which ‘Janey’ is repeatedly mentioned. The use of this diminutive, with its connotations of intimacy and informality, must have raised questions about the relationship between the two. Later in his account, for instance, Hake noted: ‘Interesting as Rossetti must always be to a large section of society, I have not considered myself justified in entering at any length on his domestic life, intimately as at one time it was mixed up with my own’ (1892: 221). W. M. Rossetti’s death in 1919 may also have been a factor in Caine’s

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 53

18/03/2013 15:50

54

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

Jane Morris revisions. Fredeman cites Caine’s revelations as one of the ‘biographical mainstays’ in charting the affair, the others being Morris’s letter to Aglaia Coronio of 25 November 1872 and Rossetti’s House of Life which ‘until recently has always been regarded as little more than a biographical sourcebook’ (1970–1: 95–6). Warhol discusses instances of narrative refusal in fiction where the reader knows what the author ‘is unable or unwilling to say while also knowing the specifics of one set of actions among the uncountable number of things that did not happen’ (2007: 267). I am proposing that similar narrative strategies may be at work in auto/biographical texts as well. Robert Buchanan, a minor poet writing under the pseudonym Thomas Maitland, published a review essay, ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’, in the Contemporary Review in October 1871 in which he attacked the artistry and morality of Rossetti and others associated with him. Although Buchanan’s identity was soon unmasked, his review sparked a series of published responses, including a riposte by Rossetti called ‘The Stealthy School of Criticism’ which appeared in the Athenaeum in December 1871. When Buchanan produced an expanded version published as a pamphlet, The Fleshly School of Poetry and Other Phenomena of the Day, however, Rossetti’s obsessive reaction heralded the onset of his delusional mania in 1872. Rossetti may have believed that Buchanan’s essay implied some knowledge of his relationship with Jane Morris, linking her with The House of Life poems more publicly. For a fuller account of the ‘Fleshly School’ controversy and its impact on Rossetti, see Fredeman (1970–1). Another who held a similar view was John Henry Middleton, the art historian and archaeologist who was a friend of William Morris (accompanying him on one of the Iceland voyages). According to Blunt in 1890, Middleton ‘is one of the few friends Mrs Morris now has left. He has a culte [sic] for her and Mrs Stillman dating from the days when Rossetti loved them both. He speaks of them with enthusiasm as the two noblest women in the world’ but Middleton ‘will not hear of Rossetti’s love for Mrs Morris having been “serious”, or more than “the talk of idle people who did not know them.” But of course he does not know all, nor did I enlighten him’ (2 September, Faulkner 1986: 69). Rossetti’s chief symptoms at this time, as described by Scott, were paranoid delusion concerning an elaborate conspiracy (‘The whole scheme is drawing closer, and when ripe he will be murdered or made to disappear’; PP, 3 July) and auditory hallucinations: ‘The [panelled] walls here . . . he now thinks are hollowed and contain people who hear through the small holes made by the hooks for curtains that have been removed’ (PP, 4 July). Scott’s correspondence towards the close of 1872 repeatedly commented on the presence of Jane Morris at Kelmscott with Rossetti. By the end of November 1872, Scott wrote to Boyd that they will need to delay their visit to Rossetti at Kelmscott ‘as Janey is coming back to him to sit again! and there might not be room for 3 visitors’ (PP, original emphasis) and, a month later, he wrote again: ‘The hollow chested (hearted?) matron writes him she will come up to Kelmscott the day after Xmas, and if she does so I suppose he will be off with her’ (PP, 14 December 1872). Why ‘more important’? Does Grylls mean that Rossetti’s creative works

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 54

18/03/2013 15:50

Scandal

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25. 26.

55

are of more significance to scholars than his life? Or that they are ‘more important’ as source material to explain his emotional life? Fredeman certainly read it as the latter, as another instance in which the perceived link between Rossetti’s 1872 breakdown and Buchanan’s attack on his work, specifically The House of Life sonnet sequence, has tended to be read as a ‘biographical document’ that confirmed the existence of an extra-marital affair (Fredeman 1965: 301). Doughty, for instance, took this view: ‘The House of Life and Rossetti’s biography are interdependent, each in some degree illuminating the other’ (1949: 384–5). Rossetti had instructed George Hake that, on his death, ‘a number of letters in sealed packets . . . must be carefully burnt at once by yourself & my brother, as well as other letters of the same description . . . My brother should if possible cause information to reach the writer of the letters that they had been burnt’ (30 April 1876; Fredeman vol. VII, 2008: 271). See also Marsh (2000: 131). Jane’s letters to Gabriel will be discussed further in Chapter 2. See also Thompson who berated ‘misleading and misguided’ biographies that read ‘twentieth-century sexual assumptions into a Victorian situation’ (1991: 28). Some contend that the sonnet referred to here is ‘Day Dream’ based on the painting of Jane of the same name, originally called Vanna Primavera, developed from a sketch done at Scalands in 1870; see Briggs (1964: 18), Doughty (1949: 608, 619) and Angeli (1949: 216). Bryson, however, gives the sonnet referred to in this letter as ‘Herself’, which concluded the first part of The House of Life (1976: 166, n. 1). Immediately after this disclosure, Blunt continues: ‘Perhaps, if she had [given herself], he might not have perished in the way he did’ (FM, Diaries, August 1892), thereby implying Jane Morris’s culpability for Rossetti’s decline and death. Blunt’s Secret Memoirs not only chart his romantic liaisons, infatuations and desires but his fluctuations of religious faith, political allegiances, and literary enthusiasms, as well as his volatile masculine friendships and his fraught relationship with his wife and daughter. On one occasion as Wilfrid and Marie rode alone in a carriage, ‘I undid the buttons of her glove and held her wonderful hand naked in mine, and so all the way home to Rome’, Blunt records (26 April 1891, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 100). The last explicit reference to sexual involvement between Jane and Wilfrid was on Blunt’s visit to Kelmscott Manor in August 1892, while Morris was absent. Blunt recorded ‘We slept together, Mrs Morris and I’ (Faulkner 1986: 69). Faulkner has this erroneously as ‘envious’ (1986: 53). Nor should we assume from this entry that formality was a hallmark of Victorian relationships whatever the level of physical intimacy. An interesting contrast is presented in Blunt’s account of his relationship with Margaret Talbot where the use of the beloved’s first name is endowed with great emotional significance in the narrative of developing intimacy: ‘What is there more delicious than these first little tendernesses, let what will come after. Once, as if by accident, she called me by my Christian name, but I

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 55

18/03/2013 15:50

56

27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

Jane Morris have not yet called her by hers’ (26 April 1890, FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 220). It is worth noting the close proximity between these events and the brief but torrid affair with Margaret Talbot that had just concluded. On 9 May, for instance, Blunt recorded: ‘A letter from Margaret which has once more set me on fire. All the afternoon I have been writing to her in answer or thinking of her as I have not of any woman for years’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 240). With the possible exception of Peterson, who describes Blunt as ‘devastatingly handsome and charming,’ and ‘unusually kind to women’ (1991: 219). Jane Morris’s interest in spiritualism will be discussed briefly in Chapter 5. Interestingly, the next letter she received from Blunt had been sent from Naples, where his diary reveals he had fled to escape his hopeless infatuation with Marie Spartali Stillman. Minny Pollen, another of Blunt’s lovers, was also acquainted with Rossetti and had spoken to Blunt about her letters from Rossetti. One of Jane’s letters revealed that Blunt had sent her some of his poems ripped from a book, a startling symbol of him offering her the scraps of his attention: ‘I perceived you tore the leaves from a bound copy of poems. I wish you had sent me the volume . . . I doubt not that it contained many verses that would have filled me with joy’ (22 June 1885; Faulkner 1986: 9). For instance, it had formed the central emblem of the stationery Rossetti designed for Jane in 1872 (see Cline 1978: 180; Fredeman vol. VI, 2006: 47–8). Blunt described an after-dinner game of twenty questions, in which the mystery object turned out to be the volume of Rossetti’s House of Life given by William Morris to his wife! ‘It is always a pleasure to me to see Rossetti still a living memory in this house’, he concluded. One can only conjecture it was Blunt who chose the mystery object in this game.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 56

18/03/2013 15:50

Chapter 2

Silence

He that tells a secret is another’s servant. Jane Morris’s keepsake book (BL, Add. 45351C)

The story goes, in Fiona MacCarthy’s words, that ‘Mrs Morris . . . took to the sofa in 1869, at the age of twenty-nine, and never really left it,’ although the cause of her invalidism remains a ‘mystery’ (1994: xiii). The myth of Jane Morris’s strategic invalidism is often allied with the trait of melancholy silence: together, these traits speak of a refusal of social engagement, a retreat from communication and connection with others. The attribution of silence to Jane Morris found in both contemporary accounts and subsequent depictions, however, needs to be interpreted mindful of the narratorial perspective and the narrative contexts in which it occurs. The silent invalid often operates as a structural device in textual accounts, working to contrast Jane Morris (usually unfavourably) with others who appear in the episodes described. Jane’s silence, for instance, is sometimes portrayed as a manipulative pose and contrasted unfavourably with Rossetti’s inability to dissemble or suppress his powerful feelings. Similarly, in relation to her husband, Jane Morris’s mute, ailing body is contrasted with William’s volubility and hyperactive productivity. My purpose here is not to rebut the charge of silent invalidism entirely but to interpret previous accounts in the light of Jane Morris’s correspondence, drawing on recent studies of Victorian invalidism and embodiment. Speaking and silence, action and immobility, illness and vitality, will be shown to be recurring issues of concern in Jane’s letters, suggesting a subject who was highly aware of the conflicting possibilities and constraints of her position in relation to others around her. As her correspondence shows, like many other Victorians of uncertain health, Jane Morris maintained relationships of care, friendship or intimacy and what to some casual observers seemed like a moody silence was interpreted by others closer to her in a variety of ways – as shyness, anxiety

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 57

18/03/2013 15:50

58

Jane Morris

for others, contemplation, or even contentment. Silence, then, is open to a range of interpretations and – as the epigraph from Jane Morris’s keepsake book suggests – may be associated with a careful reticence as much as a melancholy mutism.

‘What more can I say’: The Reticence of Jane Morris the silence of the female sex seems to have become proverbially synonymous with a degree of merit almost too great to be believed in as a fact. Sarah Stickney Ellis (1843: 91)

In the course of instructing middle-class women on the art of conversation in The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Habits, Sarah Stickney Ellis addressed the myth of feminine silence. In social situations, Ellis advised, women should strive to create a conversational space in which men felt able to speak at their ease (while avoiding excessive talk, a common feminine failing, according to Ellis), and although a woman may indulge ‘in secret trains of thought and feeling . . . while she plies her busy needle, and sits quietly musing by the side of her husband, her father or her brother’ the purpose of such silent reflection should be to provide a resource for ‘conversational amusement which she is ever ready to bring forward for their use’ (1843: 91). In The Women of England, too much speaking or too much silence may hinder a woman’s performance of her social duties and attract the opprobrium of others. In this vein, then, it is not entirely surprising that Jane Morris’s silence was often judged harshly and associated with morbid self-absorption and emotional manipulation, especially when the two most famous attributions of silence come from Henry James and George Bernard Shaw, men who – both personally and professionally – may have had certain expectations about the proper conduct of dialogue in social situations. The recollections of James and Shaw have probably done more to reify the myth of the silent Jane Morris than anyone else. Writing to his sister Alice – herself a persistent invalid – after visiting the Morrises in 1869, Henry James described Jane as the embodiment of the PreRaphaelite aesthetic, before concluding: ‘[Mrs. Morris], having a bad toothache, lay on the sofa, with her handkerchief to her face . . . [a] dark silent medieval woman with her medieval toothache’ (Lubbock 1920: 17–18). In James’s account, Jane’s silence is metonymically linked both with her ailment and her aestheticisation in a mute tableau of suffering. Likewise, in much subsequent discussion, it is often difficult to separate Jane’s silence from her performance of invalidism. Her ailing body is

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 58

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

59

assumed to speak a truth that the woman is unable to express on her own behalf, a truth that – paradoxically – reveals the inauthenticity of her performance. In such accounts, the fixity of ‘the image of the invalid lying permanently on the sofa’ (Marsh 2000: 79) does not so much perpetuate the mystery of Jane Morris as render her all too decipherable through the trope of an invalidism assumed to be convenient or strategic. Silence, however, was also attributed to Jane Morris in situations where her health did not figure as an issue, as when George Bernard Shaw described Jane Morris at his first dinner at Kelmscott House as ‘the silentest woman I have ever met. She did not take much notice of anybody, and none whatever of Morris, who talked all the time’ (Shaw 1936: xxiv). Shaw was perhaps not the most reliable source on Jane Morris, not least because of his awareness of Jane’s concerns about his ambiguous relationship with May Morris, and immediately following his pronouncement on Jane’s silence he undercuts his claim by providing evidence of her speaking to good effect (the suet-pudding anecdote, recounted in the introductory chapter). In the vignettes related by James and Shaw, Jane Morris’s silence left a hermeneutic space for the observer to discern the ‘truth’ of the mute but signifying body and subsequent biographers have often followed the lead of James and Shaw in this regard. Writing in the mid-twentieth century in his biography of Morris, for instance, E. P. Thompson claimed the sources were unanimous on this aspect of Jane Morris: ‘All accounts agree upon her strange, moody beauty, her poise and majestic presence – and also on her silence’ (1976: 158). A more recent Morris scholar, Paul Thompson, similarly described Jane Morris ‘brooding on her own beauty,’ in silent retreat from her social and familial obligations (1991: 24). In both James and Shaw’s accounts, however, the artist’s model was narrativised and framed within the tropes of Pre-Raphaelite art (indeed, both men admitted their difficulty in distinguishing between the aesthetic representation and the person). Jane Morris as the personification of silence, that is, was always-already an aesthetic representation, just as in Rossetti’s drawing of Jane called ‘Silence’, for instance (1870; Surtees vol. 1: 122). Whether, for Rossetti, ‘Silence’ referred to a trait of the woman depicted or the need for silence to conceal the relationship between artist or model, the chain of association between secrecy and silence irreducibly linked Jane Morris – the ‘closed book’, in William Bell Scott’s phrase – with the mutism of the portrait sitter, through whom the artist may speak.1 Similarly, in a recollection by the author R. E. Francillon, Jane Morris was associated with the ‘motionless silence’ of a Rossetti picture although, in this instance, Rossetti himself was included in the tableau:

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 59

18/03/2013 15:50

60

Jane Morris

My most representative recollection of [Rossetti] is of his sitting beside Mrs Morris, who looked as if she had stepped out of any one of his pictures, both wrapped in a motionless silence as of a world where souls have no need of words. And silence, however poetically golden, was a sin in a poet whose voice in speech was so musical as his – hers I am sure I never heard. (Francillon 1914: 172)2

While Francillon implied that Jane had effectively robbed Rossetti of his voice, the image of shared silence also symbolised the exclusive intimacy between the two. Wilfrid Blunt who, as discussed in the previous chapter, modelled his liaison on Jane’s earlier relationship with Rossetti, also prized the silence of an intimacy ‘where souls have no need of words’ in his clandestine affairs. Blunt’s Secret Memoirs often rhapsodised on the non-verbal communication of passion – the exchange of glances, the furtive handholding – that characterised the early stages of love or sometimes (as in the case of Marie Spartali Stillman) constituted the entire affair. Writing in his diary in 1891 after visiting Jane Morris at Kelmscott House, Blunt noted: ‘we have little really in common on the outside of things, and she is so silent a woman that except through the physical senses we never could have become intimate’ (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 118). Jane’s silence as a form of challenge to male observers – as an enigma that only superior powers of observation could decode – becomes in Blunt’s recollection a rather different kind of challenge: a romantic conquest to test his powers of seduction. The tone with which Blunt described the difficulties of conducting his relationship with Jane at Kelmscott Manor (the lack of privacy, the creaky floorboards) suggests the erotic charge that he found in such secret activity. As William Cohen has observed, ‘Even without Foucault, we might have suspected from the Victorians that silence about sexuality composes a strategic form, not an absence, of representation’ (1996: 2). What Cohen terms ‘the conventions of sexual unspeakability’ operated as ‘a productive constraint’ (1996: 3) in various forms of discourse – literary, scholarly, aesthetic – so that, in this instance, the figure of the woman who represents such unspeakability becomes inseparable from the quality of silence and the transgression it apparently concealed. Despite E. P. Thompson’s claim that all accounts agreed on Jane Morris’s silence as a defining trait, however, some of her contemporaries challenged the attribution of silence with an image of an engaged and articulate Jane Morris. In these accounts, the trait of silence is mentioned, signalling that it was a quality that was already mythically associated with Jane Morris during her lifetime, but is presented as a partial or incomplete representation by those who did not know the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 60

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

61

‘real’ woman. The artist William Rothenstein, for instance, recalled: ‘I had heard and read of her moving, a noble figure, among the great people about her husband and Rossetti – noble but silent. I found her serene indeed, but interested in a thousand things: an admirable talker’ (Rothenstein 1931: 288). Edith Cooper (who with her aunt Katherine Bradley wrote as Michael Field) also captured this aspect of Jane Morris, even as she acknowledged the mythic dimension through capitalisation: ‘The Gracious Silence [Mrs Morris] [sic], when she speaks at all, speaks words of kindness, and she has been the patient friend of a deformed lady of raucous voice and vicious boredom, who remarked once that Rossetti had painted everything but her greatest beauty – her smile’ (Sturge Moore 1933: 234–5).3 Cooper and Rothenstein, then, offered a picture of a silence that was both selective and generous: silence was not a means of retreat or an absence of voice but, in these counter-examples, a communicative act and a means of social connection. For still others, however, Jane Morris’s reticence was primarily a sign of social discomfort. Graham Robertson, for instance, claimed that ‘Jane Morris was shy and retiring by nature, and revealed her real and finer self only to a few intimates’ (1931: 211), closely echoing Theodore Watts-Dunton’s earlier evaluation that ‘In spite of her beauty and her high mental qualities, she was very shy and retiring, almost fearful, in her attitude towards others’ (1916: 10). The possibility of social awkwardness resulting from class mobility will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 but is worth bearing in mind in these depictions of a shyly reticent Jane Morris. Helen Rossetti Angeli also reiterated this image in order to challenge the charge of aloofness that some levelled against Jane Morris. Angeli recalled her grandfather’s servant, known as ‘Old Charlotte’, describing Jane Morris as ‘a proud lady’ but Angeli rejected this view as a misinterpretation of Jane’s character, concluding it was shyness rather than hauteur that ‘Old Charlotte’ had witnessed (1949: 211). What is striking in each of these instances is not only the similar evaluation offered of Jane Morris’s reticence but the confidence with which each asserted their view of the authentic woman behind the myth, the truth known only to a privileged few. A further interpretation of Jane’s selective silence – as a kind of proto-feminist protest – was offered in Grylls’s Portrait of Rossetti which challenged the evaluations of Shaw and James by depicting Jane as refusing objectification by the male gaze: ‘She would have sensed that Henry James had come to look at her like a scientist examining a specimen when he called at Queen’s Square . . . She saw through the young Bernard Shaw . . . Her silence said what she thought of them all’ (1964a: 119). Grylls, however, ultimately attributes this protesting

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 61

18/03/2013 15:50

62

Jane Morris

silence to ‘boredom with her beauty, boredom with her husband’ (Grylls 1964a: 119), interpreting Jane’s response as deriving from a more generalised existential state that reflected the unhappy circumstances of her life. Refuting one mythic trait (silence) only to re-assert another (a melancholy nature), that is, Grylls is still unable to move beyond the two-dimensional depiction of Jane Morris that so often prevails. Again, interpreting the trait of silence becomes the key to understanding the ‘true’ character of Jane Morris but, as with other traits that comprised the myth, the meanings attributed to this trait are culturally framed, shaped by underlying assumptions about gender or class, art or society, which inevitably mediated the depiction offered. If we turn to a revealing letter by Jane Morris, however, where she explores the problem of reticence and its interpretation, we may gain a different perspective on her imputed silence. On her return to England in the early part of 1878 after her first winter sojourn in Italy at the invitation of Rosalind and George Howard (later, the Earl of Carlisle), Jane wrote to Rosalind informing her of her safe arrival home (CH, J22/55/4). Rosalind’s prompt reply (now lost), inspired the following equally quick response from Jane, which warrants lengthy quotation: My dear, dear Mrs Howard I can’t tell you how much I am saddened by your letter, at the thought of having given you a moment’s uneasiness, it was all my stupidity and clumsiness. When I was parting from you at Venice, if I had attempted to say one word more than the ordinary good bye, I should have broken down and been unfit for the journey be:fore me, I thought you must have understood how fond I had grown of you, and how very sorry I was to leave, you were so kind and thoughtful for me at all times, that I was often amazed when I reflected how much you had on your hands at home at the same time. [D]o not I beg you vex your:self another moment, I enjoyed being with you more than you can possibly have enjoyed being with me, you can’t think what a magical effect a bright presence like yours has on so quiet a creature as myself, I enjoyed every visit you made me, and every day that your husband painted near us more than I can say, it seems impossible that you should not have known this all along and have trusted my affection just as I trusted yours . . . Now pray do not criticise this as a literary production, I am jotting down my thoughts as they come into my head only anxious not to miss a post, I got your letter last night late, I could not write then, but dreamt of myself as a monster in many forms, and hated myself whenever I woke up, my dullness and illmanners seemed unpardonable, pray forgive me and remember me only as some one who loves you, is most grateful to you, I really do consider that I owe Jenny’s restoration to health to our going to Italy, I should not have gone in any other way, therefore I owe it to you, and you as a mother can judge what this means, we consider her quite well now. As to your charge against yourself of chaffing my husband, of course, I never resented it in the least. I am so glad you spoke out, for now we shall

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 62

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

63

never misunderstand each other again, shall we? I shall see you whenever I can, and when I can’t, I shall think of you, and always as long as I live shall remember our stay in Italy as one of the happiest bits of my life. What more can I say, except that I shall always be Yours most affectionately Jane Morris. (n.d., [1878] CH, J22/55/6, emphasis added)

The length of this letter, and the depth and spontaneity of feeling it seeks to express, distinguish it from much of the remaining correspondence written by Jane Morris.4 With some exceptions, Jane’s letters tend towards brevity and restraint, although with some correspondents (notably, Wilfrid Blunt) there are flashes of humour or wit, while with others there are also warm expressions of affection (such as at times with Sydney Cockerell).5 In this letter, however, Jane expresses her intense misgivings about her silence on parting from Rosalind and discloses the physical toll exacted by articulating strong emotions (‘if I had attempted to say one word more . . . I should have broken down’). Jane’s pain is further exacerbated by her discovery that her friend seems to have interpreted her reticence as a lack of feeling. Here, then, Jane Morris self-identifies as a reticent woman but is deeply troubled at any inference that she is therefore unfeeling or unresponsive to friends and her letter conveys an almost overwhelming emotional conflict. While self-chastisement is the dominant note, there is also a disappointment that Rosalind had not sensed Jane’s true feelings (‘I thought you must have understood’), with the implied criticism that true intimacy transcends words, and that her friend should have known her better (as ‘so quiet a creature’) after their time together in Italy. This letter in fact hinges on the question whether speaking or silence is the guarantee of true feelings. Is silence a sign of emotional disconnection, a rupturing of relationship, or of trusting intimacy? Here, to speak is to make oneself vulnerable but to remain silent is to cause pain to others. The rhetorical question with which the letter closes (‘What more can I say’) does not definitively end the matter, leaving a lingering impression of a letter writer perplexed by a baffling range of signifying practices (letters, dreams, speech) that she struggles to interpret. There is a persistent anxiety about the potential of words to harm or judge despite Jane’s assertion that she was ‘so glad you spoke out’. The image of the nightmare is particularly poignant: the dreamer is troubled by monstrous self-representations which do not correspond with her sense of self, suggesting the trauma of being misinterpreted, misunderstood, and out of kilter with her surroundings. Jane’s plea to Rosalind – ‘do not criticise this as a literary production’ – further conveys her doubts concerning her capacity to articulate

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 63

18/03/2013 15:50

64

Jane Morris

her feelings, in sharp contrast with Rosalind Howard, described as ‘a bright presence’ who can speak freely and is characterised as ‘kind and thoughtful’ towards others. Enclosed with this letter, moreover, is a separate smaller sheet of paper, containing the following poem written in Jane Morris’s hand: What matter makes it that the Sun shines not Upon this day, among the fairest fair? Ne’er is that house of Heaven’s light forgot Where thou dost live, dispelling wild-eyed Care: Live long, dear lady, loved, and honoured dearly By daughters, friends, all folk that thou dost bless, And may thy Winter snowless be, not merely At life’s sore close, the torn, unlovely dress That many dread, and try to cope withal, By false young bloom, a grim & ghastly gaud; But as in winter green grows laurel-wall, Where flit the red-breast birds, & sing their laud, Such be thy latter blessings – ‘midst the strife Of warring mortals, peaceful be thy life. Oneglia, 1878

This poem’s inclusion with Jane Morris’s letter to Rosalind Howard implies that she sees Rosalind as the ‘dear lady’, ‘loved and honoured dearly’ by all who know her, whose home dispels ‘wild-eyed Care’ through her presence. It is a conventional enough depiction of the ‘angel in the house’ stereotype so strongly associated with Victorian femininity but in the metaphorical contrasts between winter/sorrow/death and sun/ light/life – encapsulated in the speaker’s wish, ‘may thy Winter snowless be’ – there also seems a more literal dimension, calling to mind the winterless south where Jane and Rosalind had so recently been together. What is the status of this sonnet? Who wrote it? The closing reference ‘Oneglia, 1878’ directs the reader to a very specific context; usually such a marker refers to the place and time of composition or, at least, to a location that grounds the meaning of the poem. Is this sonnet, then, attributable to Jane Morris? It seems odd that, having worried about Rosalind reading her letter as a ‘literary production,’ she would then include a poem of her own composition but I have not been able to identify another source for this sonnet. Such a personal inclusion would not only imply a high level of trust and intimacy between sender and recipient but it would also suggest that the poem had been written in advance (perhaps at Oneglia), given that Jane states she is sending the letter the day after receiving Rosalind’s (and after a troubled night that would seem to preclude sonnet writing).6 It is impossible to be conclusive about this letter and its enclosure but

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 64

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

65

it is nonetheless invaluable for opening up a different perspective on the issue of Jane Morris and silence, or reticence as I prefer to term it, indicating a sense of reserve in communication rather than a refusal to speak at all. If feminist scholars have often seen silence as a symbol of women’s powerlessness, and associated voice with women’s agency and social recognition, I want to suggest that the assumption that silence is inherently an incommunicative state needs further interrogation. While Jane Morris’s letter to Rosalind Howard expressed anguish over how to give proper expression to one’s feelings the letter also powerfully communicated a desire to connect with a dear friend, to maintain a relationship in which each would understand the other, whether speaking or silent. By showing that Jane Morris spoke about unspeakability and grappled with the dilemma of how to express feelings and thoughts when articulation was always open to misunderstanding or conflict, this letter reconfigures Jane Morris’s silence as a reticence that, in the context of valued social relationships, sought to foster intimacy and communication, rather than avoid it.

‘Dear suffering Janey’: The Myth of Invalidism The trope of the genteel invalid, familiar through the image of the lady reclining on the sofa, associated the feminine with weakness and languor. In art of the period, the lounging or reclining woman was also linked to an exotic and eroticised femininity (for instance, in depictions of harem interiors or the odalisque; Pal-Lapinski 2005: 17) and while Rossetti’s many sketches of a reclining Jane Morris usually depicted her in more mundane scenarios (reading a newspaper, embroidering), her distinctive physical appearance, undressed hair, and unstructured style of dress still had a hint of the exotic that lent a sexual allure to the Rossettian woman on the sofa. As with other aspects of the myth of Jane Morris, then, the imputation of invalidism has been refracted through the lens of her aesthetic depictions, especially in the iconography of Rossetti’s art. Jane’s invalidism, however, has also been negotiated around the figure of William Morris, his productivity and garrulity contrasting with the melancholy stillness of his wife. The ‘disease [of] simply being William Morris’ was described by one contemporary as the cause of Morris’s death (Mackail vol. 2, 1899: 336), alluding to Morris’s indefatigable energy and capacity to multi-task, combined with a volatile temperament. The disease of simply being Jane Morris, on the other hand, often seems to have been taken as sufficient explanation for her life. Henderson’s biography of William Morris, for instance, follows

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 65

18/03/2013 15:50

66

Jane Morris

a brief account of the Morrises’ wedding with the assertion that Jane ‘was to pass the greater part of her days as a confirmed invalid’ (1967: 57), as if no more needed to be said. So what was wrong with Jane Morris? That she was often incapacitated throughout her adult life cannot be disputed but the difficulty of decoding chronic conditions from seasonal illness or secondary infections (themselves potentially life-threatening in an era without antibiotics), as well as the imputation of nervous or psychological disorders, has led to much speculation, often of an unsympathetic kind. The most cited symptom was chronic back pain, hence the frequent need to recline on a sofa, although Jane was able to travel (by train, boat, even gondola) in a semi-recumbent position, and to carry on her needlework in this position too (Bryson 1976: 108). Delicacy of digestion and appetite, as well as general lassitude or weakness, is often mentioned but these kinds of symptoms could be associated with convalescence from secondary infections or episodes of fever rather than being a generalised or persistent condition. Jane’s trip to the German spa town of Bad Ems in 1869 has been widely assumed to be due to a gynaecological disorder, as treatment for such disorders was an advertised feature of the resort (MacCarthy 1994: 201; Marsh 2000: 260) and the fact that May Morris never elaborated on the symptoms which took her mother to Bad Ems has been taken to lend further support to a diagnosis of a gynaecological problem of some kind (Morris 1911 vol. V: xi–xii).7 Melancholia or depression has also been named in connection with Jane, although it is certainly debatable if this was triggered in response to domestic crises (such as episodes of deterioration in Jenny Morris’s epilepsy) or was a dispositional tendency. Against this range of complaints, however, other evidence complicates the picture somewhat. Jane’s two (known) pregnancies and labours, for instance, seem to have been free of complication although – as is so often the case in Victorian contexts – this inference is largely based on archival silence. In addition, as Marsh has argued, photographs of Jane in old age depict her maintaining an admirable posture, seemingly ruling out the existence of a serious spinal condition (Marsh 2000: 78). The ‘mystery of the ill health of Mrs Morris’ (MacCarthy 1994: xiii), then, is due partly to a certain ellipsis – a different form of silence – in contemporary discussions of Jane’s health that has required interpretation by later biographers and scholars. In this interpretative process, the body’s capacity to communicate the truth of the subject’s emotional life has been assumed to provide the key to understanding a historical subject who would otherwise remain mute. In the case of Jane Morris, interpreting the body has been complicated by two factors, the first being

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 66

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

67

that pain was the most persistent symptom. As Elaine Scarry observes, ‘To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt’ (1985: 13). But if we accept the repeated statements about Jane Morris’s pain then the difficulty of narrating such a chronic symptom needs to be considered as a factor shaping both Victorian and subsequent accounts of Jane’s invalidism. As Stoddard Holmes and Chambers attest, chronic pain is hard to narrate ‘because of its intermittent yet ongoing nature and its lack of clear trajectory’ (2005: 132). Chronic pain is also frequently accommodated within the contexts of work and social life, as part of the ebb and flow of ‘normal’ life to which sufferers adapt (Holmes and Chambers 2005: 132). Despite its ubiquity, however, the fundamental ‘unsharability’ of pain (Scarry 1985: 4) renders its representation problematic. There is no single, authoritative account of pain that would prove the severity or otherwise of the sufferer’s experience to observers, there are only socially recognised (or misrecognised) accounts, imagery or behaviour through which it can be conveyed. The dilemma, in short, is that whether the sufferer is silent or articulate ambiguity remains: silence could be seen as an expression of a Victorian ‘ideal of nonverbalized suffering’ or as an invalidation of the pain’s existence; verbal expression may fail to convey the sufferer’s experience convincingly or be construed as protesting too much (Bending 2000: 132). The second complicating factor in accounting for Jane Morris’s health has been the common identification of a psychosomatic element in her condition. Even if we accept Joyce McDougall’s inclusive account of psychosomatic phenomena as ‘all cases of physical damage or ill health in which psychological factors play an important role’, it remains difficult to draw a firm conclusion as to the basis of Jane Morris’s ill health on the existing evidence (McDougall 1989: 19).8 Further, if, as McDougall maintains, ‘Emotion is essentially psychosomatic’ and it is common to ‘somatise’ when stressful events override more customary ways of dealing with mental pain or conflict, the attribution of a psychosomatic explanation to Jane Morris’s invalidism does not necessarily close the question of her invalidism (McDougall 1989: 95, 20). Nevertheless, in the twentieth-century biographical tradition, psychosomatism is often paradoxically both a charge – especially when it is described in the more loaded term as ‘basically neurotic’ (e.g. Henderson 1967: 81) – and an explanation for the life of Jane Morris. In the nineteenth century, however, the matter of physical or emotional impairment was handled somewhat differently. Mackail’s biography of William Morris, for instance, is noteworthy for its unease with issues of illness or the intrusion of the body into the life of his subject. As Mackail outlined in a letter to S. C. Cockerell in 1897: ‘The

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 67

18/03/2013 15:50

68

Jane Morris

fluctuations of illness are certainly no matter for permanent record, either in [Morris’s] own case or in that of others; one of the sources of embarrassment in his more intimate letters is the perpetual recurrence of Jenny’s state of health from day to day’ (BL, Add. 52734, emphasis added). While Jane Morris also wavered on whether Jenny’s illness should be mentioned in Mackail’s biography, her stated concern was Jenny’s response, whereas Mackail’s letter implies a more generalised unease about any reference to health matters.9 Mackail’s insistence on the exclusion of the body from history as at best irrelevant and at worst ‘embarrassing’ not only impeded the representation of Morris’s distress over his daughter’s epilepsy, it also required him to largely ignore a recurring concern of Morris’s correspondence and a substantial aspect of his everyday life, namely health. As Peter Gay has observed, health was a theme that dominated nineteenth-century personal letters, whether expressing concern for the health of the addressee or recounting the writer’s current condition, and showed that close attention to the condition of the body was a significant aspect of daily experience (Gay 1995: 326). Mackail’s reluctance to address the issue tells us much about what was considered appropriate for the public disclosure of biography, but as Norman Kelvin’s Collected Letters of William Morris have since made abundantly clear, Morris’s public life – whether concerning the Firm, his writing, or his political activities – was at all times interwoven with his own health, both physical and emotional, and solicitude for the health of friends and family. Despite Mackail’s reservations, in fact, Morris’s body does intrude into the biography, notably in a lengthy passage (much condensed here) where Mackail seeks to convey the unique vitality of his subject: [Morris] had the incessant restlessness of a wild creature . . . Even at work or at meals he could not sit still for long . . . This restless movement was a necessity to him as a means of working off his great bodily strength and superabundant vitality . . . He was often at work at his writing, or his designing, or his loom, by the summer sunrise . . . His mind was always working, and his hands never long idle. (vol. 1, 1899: 215–19)

A similar account of Morris’s rough vigour was offered by William Michael Rossetti: The author of The Earthly Paradise was the least paradisal of men, if we regard Paradise as a scene of fruition and serene content: he was turbulent, restless, noisy (with a deep and rather gruff voice), brusque in his movements, addicted to stumbling over doorsteps, breaking down solid-looking chairs the moment he took his seat in them, and doing scores of things inconsistent with the nerves of the nervous. (vol. 1, 1906: 214–15)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 68

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

69

While W. M. Rossetti’s motives for this portrait of Morris may be more mixed, Mackail’s association of Morris with hyperactive, almost animalistic, embodiment allowed the biographer to distinguish Morris’s productivity and versatility from that of his peers in a way that favoured his subject. Such a depiction, however, has implications for subsequent representations of Jane Morris in relation to her husband. Compared to the demonstrable output of Morris, ‘enough to fill not one, but many lives’ (Mackail vol. 2, 1899: 267), the labours of his wife, occluded by the veil conventionally drawn over domesticity, are also obscured by invalidism with its connotation of leisured idleness. Jane is thus depicted as unproductive in relation to her husband’s hyperactivity. E. P. Thompson’s 1955 biography of William Morris gave Jane a little more attention than Mackail’s had done and seemed initially to extend some sympathy to the working-class woman who ‘through no fault of hers’ became the object of Morris’s chivalrous intentions (Thompson 1976: 75). Although he posited that Jane’s character and motives remain an ‘enigma’ beyond the explanatory scope of the biographer, Thompson’s insistence on the ‘nervous’ basis of Jane’s personality and health problems in fact provided the key by which she became thoroughly explicable. In William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, the biographer’s uninterrogated assumptions about femininity and sexuality explain Morris’s wife through a reductive psychologism that contrasted her unfavourably with her husband’s earnest integrity and plain-spokenness (Thompson 1976: 158). Silence, for instance, soon slips into ‘passivity’, a quality Thompson frequently attributes to Jane, and which seems to serve as a euphemism for frigidity, lending her a distinctly unappealing aspect in Thompson’s biography (1976: 158–61). It is in this context that Thompson portrays her decline into invalidism as a kind of affectation associated with her aspirational class identity. By 1877, Thompson avers, ‘Janey appears to have entered a settled melancholia and hypochondria (the symptoms mentioned include lumbago, sciatica, neuralgia, migraine, sore throats, fevers)’ (1976: 812, n. 19, emphasis added). While apparently attributing a psychological cause to Jane’s ill health, Thompson effectively implies the inauthenticity of Jane’s condition through the narrative juxtaposition of emotional estrangement from her husband with what he sees as her narcissistic investment in the cultivation of symptoms (‘melancholy self-absorption’, Thompson calls it; 1976: 159). The constellation of symptoms Thompson attributes to Jane, moreover, removes any sense of chronology or variation in her state of health. In fact, the trajectory of illness that can be reconstructed from correspondence to and from Jane Morris suggest that, like many

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 69

18/03/2013 15:50

70

Jane Morris

other Victorians, seasonal variation was a distinguishing feature of her health (such as a tendency to bronchitis in the winter months) and other contextual factors explained specific episodes of illness (such as bouts of fever when travelling in Italy, a common fate for English travellers at this time). Interpreting Jane’s symptoms solely as hysterical in nature not only confused the ‘hysterical’ with the organic, but conflated the psychosomatic with the inauthentic, all subsumed within an inalterable psychological disposition. For Thompson, then, Jane’s character was fixed, ‘congeal[ed] around visual appearance and physical condition’ (to borrow Cherry and Pollock’s description of the textual representations of another Pre-Raphaelite beauty, Elizabeth Siddall; 1984: 209). Given the rather heavy-handed and dismissive treatment of Jane in Thompson’s biography (first published in 1955), then, it would not be surprising to find that Jane Morris was subjected to re-evaluation with the rise of feminist scholarship. Beginning in the 1970s, Victorian female invalidism began to be interpreted within a framework in which women’s bodies were understood as sites of political contestation. Numerous feminist studies (including Ehrenreich and English 1973, Showalter 1985) sought to demonstrate the ways that Victorian cultural norms either victimised women – patriarchal socialisation ‘literally [made] women sick, both physically and mentally’, as Gilbert and Gubar memorably expressed it (1979: 54) – or resulted in women’s unconscious rebellion through incurable symptoms (Vrettos 1995: 22). The concept of strategic invalidism associated with women like Florence Nightingale provided a powerful device to explain how women could negotiate confining gender conventions for their own ends in the nineteenth century. Such feminist revision raised the possibility that Jane Morris could be seen as a transgressive figure whose symptoms were either a silent, possibly unconscious, protest or a strategic deployment of the constraints of feminine indisposition to escape other socially imposed roles. In fact, however, what emerged was simply another version of the inauthentic woman found in earlier depictions. Marsh, for instance, noting that ‘upwardly mobile women often adopted weakness as a badge of gentility – too much health and vigour gave the impression of belonging to a lower class’, posited that the ‘benefits of invalidism’ for Jane Morris not only included deflecting social attention from her developing relationship with Rossetti but provided a powerful means of manipulating Rossetti’s emotions (2000: 79). Marsh speculated on the nature and causes of Jane’s chronic health problems, raising the possibility of ‘a gynaecological cause’ and also speculating on the role of ‘emotional stress’, that catch-all, quasi-medical term (2000: 79). Given that this discussion occurs in a chapter entitled ‘Jane Discovers the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 70

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

71

Benefits of Invalidism’, however, the question of the legitimacy of Jane’s suffering is subject to doubt from the outset – Marsh had prefaced her discussion of the topic with the statement: ‘It is worth pointing out . . . that as far as can be ascertained, Janey suffered from no severe organic disease’ (2000: 79). Despite a discussion of the gender and class connotations of robust health and genteel illness for Victorian women which Marsh rightly insists must provide the context within which Jane’s reputation as a ‘chronic invalid’ should be viewed, the clear implication is that Jane’s retreat to the sofa was a silent plea for sympathy, motivated by her fear of social reprisals resulting from her evident attachment to Rossetti (Marsh 2000: 80). Marsh had, however, put the matter in even stronger terms in her Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, published the year prior to the first edition of Jane and May Morris. Discussing the Morris’s trip to Bad Ems in 1869, Marsh speculated that the trip abroad allowed Jane to avoid the increasing complexities of her relationship with Rossetti while ensuring his romantic interest was maintained because ‘he responded to illness, as Lizzie [Siddall] had found, with renewed devotion’ (1985: 261). Having first stated that Jane’s ‘sickness may have been an unconscious means of securing the public support she needed at this point’, Marsh then continued: In this she was successful, . . . the legend of Janey’s weakness and debility served and still serves to protect her from criticism: the invalid who languished on the sofa most of her life is not generally felt to have been capable of decisive action, and all the responsibility for her extra-marital affair has been ascribed to Gabriel. In the terms used by the old-fashioned divorce courts, he is seen as the culpable figure, whereas in my view that role was largely taken by Jane. (1985: 261, emphasis added)

The possibility that Jane’s symptoms were the result of unconscious processes seemingly discounted, Marsh concludes that Jane was more culpable than Rossetti in the emotional entanglement and its consequences. Strategic invalidism is therefore implied to be such a powerful means of agency for Victorian women that it trumps the autonomy of the male artist. A strange continuity between Marsh and E. P. Thompson’s version of Jane’s ‘illness’ thus emerges, at odds with their more explicitly avowed – and divergent – attitudes to gender issues. Whether, then, Jane’s prostration on the sofa was the result of the conversion of emotional distress into symptom or a knowing manipulation of invalidism comes to mean the same thing in these accounts. It can now probably never be known whether Jane’s symptoms derived from an undiagnosed organic or psychosomatic condition, but, by situating Marsh’s (in many ways) revisionist reading of Jane Morris

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 71

18/03/2013 15:50

72

Jane Morris

in relation to the broader biographical tradition, it becomes clear that the biographies, whether apparently sympathetic or otherwise, are haunted by a question of authenticity in relation to bodily symptoms. Far from Jane’s invalidism protecting her from criticism, as Marsh asserts, it has figured as the crucial site for questioning the legitimacy of Jane Morris’s role and status. The seemingly powerless but actually controlling woman that emerges from Marsh’s account is more consistent with Victorian constructions of the femme-fatale figure than with post-Freudian understandings of the mind-body relationship that seek to undermine the sharp ‘opposition between natural causation and cultural meanings’ (Moi 2000: 71). Whether attributed to ‘nerves’, ‘stress’ or Victorian sexual double standards, then, Jane’s invalidism is always problematic in the biographical tradition and remains so in the most recent authoritative biography of William Morris by Fiona MacCarthy. While in some ways diverging from the kind of standard ‘artist’s biography’ Cherry and Pollock describe (1984: 212), William Morris: A Life for Our Time largely repeated the stereotype of Jane Morris’s strategic frailty. In a brief discussion of Janey’s invalidism, framed in rather similar terms to Marsh, MacCarthy asks: Was Janey’s trouble basically spinal? Or was it gynaecological? Or was it the result of her emotional troubles? Janey’s ill health continued intermittently for much of her life, but there is no evidence that she ever suffered from a serious organic disease. Her illness must be seen in the context of its period. A good deal has been written about how Victorian women were ‘invalided out’ of society; Janey exemplifies the opposite tendency, the illness of convenience, for the women to whom taking to the sofa added a new, exotic dimension, attracting sympathy, cultivating mystery, removing them to realms beyond domestic blame. (1994: 201, emphasis added)

The nomination of the ‘illness of convenience’ not only casts doubt on the existence of Jane’s symptoms but works to attract further sympathy for William Morris, who must heroically overcome the ‘domestic handicaps’ of his wife and daughter’s ill health (MacCarthy 1994: xiii).10 Like Jenny Morris’s epilepsy, Jane’s debility had an air of unpredictability but this is where the similarity ends for MacCarthy: ‘the ease with which Janey could spring back into normal activity, with Rossetti or with Blunt, able suddenly to walk for many miles across the country-side, suggests her illnesses were psychological as well’ (1994: xiii).11 In the context of an illness of convenience, then, ‘psychological’ seems synonymous with ‘invented’, or at least strategically and hence knowingly deployed, rather than an unconscious somatisation of emotional distress or conflict. MacCarthy’s association of Jane’s health with Rossetti and Blunt, moreover, clearly implies an emotional-sexual dimension

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 72

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

73

to Jane’s episodes of vitality and further contrasts the passivity of the invalid on the sofa with the active sexual agency of the adulterous woman. Like Thompson, then, MacCarthy assumes a binary of health/ illness that does not give sufficient weight to the complexities of context or bodily capacities. A childhood anecdote told by May Morris, however, situates illness within everyday family life and allows for a more complex interpretation of the negotiation of health and illness within familial intimacy in which even a child could play a part. It is not an image of an isolated invalid withdrawn from social contact in the sanctuary of the sick room but located within a nexus of domestic relationships. ‘My best beloved doll,’ May wrote, was a discarded little jointed lay-figure of father’s, whose name was John. When mother was specially unwell and lay abed, I used to bring him down wrapped in a ragged piece of green baize (he had no wardrobe) to pay her a visit. She had to kiss the dint on his gaunt nose, much to my father’s amusement, and I thought my treasure would surely comfort her. (vol. IV, 1911: xiii)

May’s doll ritual, reserved for occasions when her mother was ‘specially unwell’ and thus confined to bed, firstly reminds us that the lady on the sofa was, after all, still socially visible through her presence in the more public spaces of the home, and that the degree of ill health was signified in part by the invalid’s location in the home. May’s doll serves as a kind of transitional object, through which a child could negotiate her relationship with her parent and balance conflicting needs for nurture and independence (see Winnicott 1953). That is, it allowed the child to express her love for her mother while at the same time it provided an opportunity to transcend the child’s powerlessness within the family by reversing the roles of parent and child, carer and patient. The masculinegendered doll – named ‘John’ and described as belonging to May’s father – further situates the transitional object within the triangular relationships between child, father and mother, where the child effectively orders the mother to love the father (kiss the father’s doll) while bestowing the ‘gift’ of the father upon the mother. Through the doll, then, the child claims the power to mediate the relationship between her parents and enacts a wish for a harmonious family. Recalled in a light-hearted tone (further registered by the reference to ‘my father’s amusement’), the doll story represents a powerfully resonant, if largely non-verbal, emotional transaction within the Morris family in which the invalid mother plays a central role. May’s story warns us against any simplistic understanding of the passivity of the invalid and shows how conflicting

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 73

18/03/2013 15:50

74

Jane Morris

familial loyalties and intimacies could be negotiated within a complex network of feelings centred on illness and nurture. In her study of Victorian invalidism, Maria Frawley described the invalid as an ambiguous and ‘multivalent social actor’ whose role was socially scripted and inflected by other dimensions of identity such as gender and class (Frawley 2004: 4). Drawing on Frawley, we may see Jane Morris’s invalidism as a performance not in the sense of fakery but rather as enacting a social role shaped by conflicting obligations and desires, as well as by physical and social constraints. Frawley charts two major strands in representations of invalidism in nineteenth-century Britain: one in which the invalid was represented as actively engaged in the restoration of health (for example through travel or undertaking experimental treatments); and another characterised by an acceptance of a chronic, settled state of ill health (often but not always associated with nervous disorders or hypochondria) (2004: 5). While biographers like Thompson or MacCarthy placed Jane Morris in the latter category, a closer examination of her correspondence portrays her as actively seeking a return to health. Evaluating cures and sometimes rejecting proposed treatments (such as the use of opiates12), travelling at home and abroad, and, not least, repeatedly expressing a desire for activity and a pleasure in vitality, Jane Morris did not passively resign herself to incapacity. Jane’s invalidism, however, was negotiated within a social context characterised by what Athena Vrettos has called a ‘compelling desire to “talk of diseases” in the nineteenth century’ (1995: 1). The concerns expressed by both William Morris and Rossetti, for instance, in letters written to Jane while she was in Italy with Rosalind and George Howard in 1877–8, attest to the solicitude with which Victorians scrutinised the wellbeing of loved ones. Even the handwriting in a letter could become a cause for alarm: Rossetti detects Jane’s decline by the absence of her usual ‘firm hand’ and her resort to writing in pencil, from which he inferred she was unable to sit upright to use an ink pen (Bryson 1976: 53, 58). In the light of this context, it is interesting to note that in letters to Rossetti, Jane usually adopted a light tone, downplaying her health concerns. In a letter apologising for delaying a visit to him after her return from Italy, for instance, Jane described her altered appearance resulting from a bout of fever (including both hair and weight loss) and signed herself as ‘Scarecrow’. Rossetti, it seems, did not share Jane’s humour: ‘never sign anything again but your own dear name,’ he scolded in reply, ‘it is no joke to substitute nonsense for that’ (Bryson 1976: 69).13 Even a relatively cursory examination of letters to and from Jane begins to complicate the picture of the ‘dark silent medieval woman’

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 74

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

75

reclining on a sofa that Henry James had mocked. Far from fostering an ‘illness of convenience’, Jane Morris demonstrated considerable ingenuity in seeking to minimise the inconvenience – to herself and others – of a chronic back condition and she seems to have viewed idleness as negatively as her husband. In a letter to Rossetti, Jane referred in passing to her ability to embroider ‘when I am lying down flat on my back’ (‘I find it hurts my eyes less than reading constantly’, she continued; Bryson 1976: 108) and sketches of Jane by Rossetti show her reclining on a sofa still engaged in favourite activities such as needlework or reading books or newspapers. There are several instances where Jane contrived to have a sofa provided or to find some means to ensure semi-recumbence so that she could still participate in trips or outings with family and friends. For example, prior to her first trip to Italy with Rosalind and George Howard, Jane reassured Rosalind: ‘as to a long railway journey, I can do that quite easily lying down, which I fancy is always possible’ (CH, J22/55/2). Jane also successfully undertook more rustic journeys as well, such as a holiday spent with May at Cormell Price’s Broadway Tower. In a letter to Price, Jane wrote: We went out early this morning to enjoy the lark’s song, we made friends with the poor old dog, admired the hills, got very cold, and came in and got up a good fire . . . Our beds are luxurious, being the two of us, and I brought a sofa to use in the daytime . . . I believe I am getting fatter already. (Price 1983–4: 54)

Much later, May, describing the Tower as ‘the most inconvenient and the most delightful place ever seen’, recalled that ‘my dear mother was rather heroic on these occasions, quietly forgoing the many little comforts that a delicate lady needs’ (vol. XII, 1911: xii). As on so many occasions, Jane Morris enjoyed a physical vigour when away from London, whether in the British countryside or abroad in Italy – a state of health that was not solely confined to the company of Rossetti and Blunt, as MacCarthy charged. It was, however, Jane’s association with Rossetti that has tended to reinforce her image as a rather melodramatic invalid (‘Dear suffering Janey,’ he begins one letter; 3 January 1880, Bryson 1976: 132). As Briggs has noted, in this correspondence, ‘The dominant theme is Rossetti’s obsessive concern for Mrs Morris’s health’ (1964: 5). If, as I have suggested in discussing Mackail’s biography, Jane’s invalidism has been unflatteringly juxtaposed with her husband’s zealous productivity, through Rossetti, Jane has become associated with a kind of codependent hypochondria. MacCarthy, for instance, described Jane and Gabriel as ‘intertwined in illness, . . . theirs was hypochondriac passion,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 75

18/03/2013 15:50

76

Jane Morris

taken to extremes’ (1994: 242), while E. P. Thompson similarly saw them as ‘two self-preoccupied people, conjoined by a melancholy retrospective obsession’ (1976: 812, n. 19). Read in isolation, Jane and Rossetti’s correspondence can seem preoccupied with health, especially on his side. In particular, the letters Rossetti wrote while Jane Morris was at Bad Ems in 1869 displayed a keen attention to the slightest fluctuation in Jane’s condition, displacing his romantic obsession with her into a form that could more easily be accommodated within the conventions of personal correspondence, especially as the letters were often mediated by, if not addressed to, William Morris as well. Jane and Rossetti, however, were not alone amongst Victorian couples in this respect; as Miriam Bailin has observed, G. H. Lewes and George Eliot, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Henrietta and T. H. Huxley all ‘shared or competed with each other’s bodily unease’ (1994: 2). Rossetti’s Bad Ems correspondence, moreover, is not solely concerned with Jane’s health (or his own) but conveys news or expresses anxiety about the health of Edward Burne-Jones, Charles Eliot Norton, P. P. Marshall, Bessie Burden and Burnell Payne. From death and amputation to seasickness and depression, a wide range of maladies are recounted in Rossetti’s letters, with the assumption that his sympathetic concern for a network of friends and associates will be shared by both William and Jane. Rossetti’s ill health, like Jane’s, comprised a range of symptoms, including on his part periods of visual impairment and psychological derangement, further complicated by chloral addiction. The practice of convalescing away from home and the belief in the efficacy of coastal and rural locations for recovery clearly enabled Jane and Gabriel to spend time alone together that would not have been possible in other circumstances. In 1870, for instance, the two met at Scalands, a property belonging to Barbara Bodichon, where Rossetti sought a restoration of health and artistic inspiration, and Jane joined him from Hastings where she was recovering from a throat infection (Marsh 1999: 383–90). Rossetti described to Ford Madox Brown how, at Scalands, he had been able to resume work, thus combining the rationale of Jane’s modelling with her convalescence to explain the duration of her stay: Janey has been here for a week & is wonderfully better. She walks 3 miles a day easily. I believe if she stayed a month, she would be set up better than by all the mineral baths of Germany. This evening Top [i.e. Morris] comes down to stay a day or two, but I hope she will remain longer, as it is most important she shd do so. I have begun a drawing of her which I am sure is the best thing I ever did; and have enjoyed returning to work a little immensely. (Fredeman vol. IV, 2004: 448–9)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 76

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

77

Rossetti also communicated the progress of Jane’s health in letters to his family and friends, implying that there was no impropriety in broaching such a topic with them and, as in his Bad Ems letters, discussion of Jane’s health allowed her to feature in his letters as a recurring concern. By contrast, Jane’s remaining letters to Rossetti – shorter in length and fewer in number than his to her – attend sympathetically to Rossetti’s symptoms while confiding her own state of health in a relatively matter-of-fact tone, contextualised by the seasons and domestic events. In a fairly typical example, shortly after moving into Kelmscott House at Hammersmith Jane wrote to Rossetti: ‘I am grieved indeed to hear of your bad nights, mine are improving I expect I am over-tired and anxious to get things straight, and moreover I have got used to the noise of the river-steamers which seemed at first to go on all night’ (Bryson 1976: 83). Jane could at times write with passion so her restrained letters to Rossetti suggest a careful balancing of affectionate concern with the kind of details of everyday domestic life that only a close friendship would warrant. Jane’s correspondence with Blunt, by contrast, often demonstrated less restraint than her letters to Rossetti and provides another challenge to the image of taciturnity associated with her. Lively and at times playful, these letters also offered a glimpse of the kind of life she would have preferred to live. They reveal, for instance, a woman whose sedentary existence contrasted with her desire for a more unencumbered life in the countryside. Whether in Italy, the Welsh hills, or at Kelmscott Manor, Jane regularly declared she was at her happiest when away from London and her letters usually described an accompanying improvement in health in such locations. During a visit to North Wales, for instance, Jane wrote to Blunt: ‘I like this place, I am in a most romantic valley with hills and woods all about me, I see different effects of sunlight every hour in the day, I go out driving, enjoy all I see, and sleep soundly afterwards, it is like a new life’ (Faulkner 1986: 34). Jane Morris repeatedly wrote of her desire to experience life outside the confines of the domestic hearth: ‘I have always thought an out-of-doors life the only one worth living’, she wrote to Blunt in January 1889 (Faulkner 1986: 27). Writing again in the summer, she said: ‘I am delighted to hear of your happiness in camping out – it must be a great pleasure, I have often wished to be a man or a very strong woman in order to try it’ (Faulkner 1986: 32). Jane’s sense of herself as, by implication, not ‘a very strong woman’ could be seen as a coquettish insistence on her own delicacy to appeal to Blunt’s masculine vanity but, in the overall context of her correspondence, such an observation is in keeping with the sense of practicality that she often expresses: ‘there must be the good climate to render [camping] possible’, she added (Faulkner 1986: 27).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 77

18/03/2013 15:50

78

Jane Morris

Nevertheless, Jane Morris, like many other Victorians with health concerns, travelled regularly, especially to places associated with therapeutic benefits such as coastal resort towns in England or the Italian Riviera, which she visited regularly from the late 1870s to the early 1890s (see Parkins 2007). As early as 1869, after returning from Bad Ems, Jane had expressed a desire to visit Italy for therapeutic purposes. ‘How I should like to pass one season in beautiful Italy, and see if that would really make me well, and if it would not, then I think my mind would be at rest for ever, about my health’, Jane wrote to Susan Sedgwick Norton in December 1869 (NFP, 426–7). While Jane’s subsequent travels in Italy may not have provided the magic solution to health problems that she, like others, hoped to find there – both the Howards and the Morrises were even hopeful that Jenny’s epilepsy could be improved by an Italian sojourn – neither did they imply the kind of incapacitation we might associate with ill health. In 1887, for example, Jane and Jenny Morris travelled through Italy, staying initially with the Howards but then continuing their own itinerary, as Jane described in a letter to Rosalind: We went to Perugia after we left Rome, stayed there a week, perfect weather all the time, we drove to Assissi [sic] one day, and thought it the most perfect place possible. I was quite free from fever directly I got among the hills – we had three days at Pisa, then went on to Turin, sleeping there a night and one night in Paris, so that there was nothing tiring about our homeward journey. (CH, J22/55/8)

On a later visit in 1892, Jane wrote glowingly to Blunt from Bordighera, ‘I am walking three or four miles at a time without feeling any ill effects afterwards . . . all is delightful with no pain to sadden or depress one’ (Faulkner 1986: 83–4). During this same trip to Italy, Jane’s letters also described a side of her as far removed from the silent invalid on the sofa as it is perhaps possible to imagine. Participating in the amateur theatricals of the novelist George MacDonald’s family, Jane cross-dressed as a troubadour wooing his lady with a mandolin serenade. ‘I managed to play a little love-ditty on my mandoline [sic] without dropping it’, she wrote to Blunt, ‘so all passed off well . . . the audience was delighted, altogether it was very amusing, especially when the love-making had to take place’ (Faulkner 1986: 84). Even when largely confined to her Hammersmith home, as she was during the winter of 1889, Jane compensated with her own pursuits and relied on the visits of friends to bring the outside world to her: ‘I am not unhappy staying in, I read and work, and friends come in and out and tell me what is going on to some extent’ (Faulkner 1986: 84). The longstanding perception of Jane Morris as a strategic invalid needs to be

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 78

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

79

reconsidered, then, within a more nuanced understanding of Victorian constructions of health and illness as a relatively fluid continuum. Among her circle of family, friends and acquaintances, Jane was hardly exceptional in alternating between periods of physical impairment and times of wellbeing and vigorous activity. Symptoms linked to season or climate could co-exist with chronic conditions and such ‘daily drama of the body’, as Virginia Woolf described it (1993: 44), was accommodated within the everyday rhythms of work, family and social life, however alarming or tedious these episodes could variously be for all concerned. Jenny’s epilepsy, William’s gout, May’s headaches and lassitude were as much a part of the Morris household as Jane’s chronic back condition and seasonal infections. So what is at stake in the persistence with which Jane has been associated with the ‘lady on the sofa’ image? If ‘to be ill is to produce narrative’, as Vrettos argued in Somatic Fictions, the silence attributed to Jane Morris’s body seems to have served as an ‘incitement to narrative’ for both contemporary acquaintances and subsequent scholars (Vrettos 1995: 2, 21). Jane Morris’s silent presence on the sofa exemplified the communicative potential attributed to women’s bodies in Victorian culture, as ‘mysterious texts that defied interpretation at the same time they demanded it’ (Vrettos 1995: 29). For observers such as Henry James, for example, Jane’s prostration on the sofa represented merely another tableau for interpretation, representing her complicity in her status as a Pre-Raphaelite icon and a melodramatic claim to gentility. The imbrication of secrets and silence in the myth of Jane Morris, then, required the mutism of the historical subject. The narrative thus produced, however, may tell us more about the Victorian context of gender and class than it does about the body thus described. The myth of Jane Morris on the sofa has often been deployed in order to contrast her unfavourably with the productive agency of others, especially her husband, generating accounts that implicitly valued a masculine form of labour and embodiment, but in post-Victorian interpretations of Jane Morris there has been surprisingly little alteration in this account. Despite the usage of psychoanalytically-inflected terms such as ‘psychosomatic’ in the biographical literature, accounts of Jane’s invalidism remain resolutely pre-Freudian in their impasse between organic illness and strategic invalidism. In none of the accounts of Jane Morris’s invalidism I have read is there any sense of an underlying psychological cause being understood as neither due to organic disease nor to deliberate performance but as a bodily expression of that which cannot be consciously acknowledged and the origin of which is as obscure to the sufferer as to the observer. Such a post-Freudian understanding of symptoms,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 79

18/03/2013 15:50

80

Jane Morris

requiring a more complex understanding of the relation between psyche and soma, would undermine the simplistic binary between legitimate illness and deliberate shamming on which the biographical accounts seem to rely. The difficulty of narrating – or verifying – pain and illness has, in the case of Jane Morris, resulted in a tenacious narrative that attests to the apparent ineluctability of a desire for a body that will yield the secret of an authenticity beyond dispute. The silence of the invalid – like the silent immobility of the artist’s model – provided a blank canvas, as it were, where observers could inscribe their own meanings. Jane Morris, as the lady on the sofa, was a body out of place, a body that was somehow outside the ordinary: apparently performing a recognisable form of bourgeois femininity – the genteel invalid – she nonetheless seemed an anomaly, a figure that demanded but ultimately eluded the masterful interpretation of the (usually masculine) observer. Writing to Blunt of her recent good health in 1888, Jane Morris joked: I shall have to find something to occupy my time if I keep as well as this. I can think of nothing but novel-writing, one of my sisters-in-law suggested standing for a Poor Law Guardian. I wonder which I should do worst. (Faulkner 1986: 24)

If her self-deprecatory humour here betrayed a clear-eyed sense of the limited range of options available to her – invalidism, philanthropy, authorship – her letters consistently demonstrated a resilience and ingenuity in dealing with reversals of health (both her own and that of others close to her), in a way that decisively refutes the myth of brooding self-absorption, devoid of emotional connection with others or interests beyond her own symptoms.

Notes 1. Rossetti’s poetry, too, repeated the familiar trope of silence as a sign of romantic intimacy and emotional authenticity, as in his sonnet ‘Silent Noon’ from The House of Life sequence (closely linked with the time spent at Kelmscott Manor with Jane Morris) which ends by celebrating the paradox of communicative silence: ‘This close-companioned inarticulate hour / When twofold silence was the song of love.’ 2. Francillon was, however, careful to note the limitations of his knowledge: ‘The reader will be kind enough to understand that I am but recalling superficial impressions, and that the extent of my acquaintance with either [i.e. Rossetti and William Morris] was not sufficient for adding anything to what others have written out of fuller knowledge’ (1914: 172–3). 3. It has been speculated that the ‘raucous lady’ referred to here was Mary de

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 80

18/03/2013 15:50

Silence

4.

5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

81

Morgan, a close friend of Jane’s. William Morris’s letters at times imply his discomfort with her volubility (‘Mary de Morgan came in & straightway fell to tackling us on Socialism with rather less than her usual noise; but with rather more than her usual ignorance’, he wrote to May in 1885; Kelvin vol. 2, 1987: 415). This letter is, however, typical of Jane Morris’s letters in its usage of idiosyncratic punctuation, such as her preference for a colon in place of a hyphen and the difficulty of distinguishing between commas and periods in her handwriting. It is difficult to make any assumptions based on the extant correspondence as what survives may be deliberately unrepresentative (i.e. the more revealing letters being more likely to have been destroyed, with the exception of those retained by Blunt). A complicating factor concerning the signature ‘Oneglia 1878’ is that the small booklet Jane Morris made and gave to Rosalind Howard also included an inscription on the inside cover, ‘Oneglia, 1878’, preceding the embellished transcription of three entries: Tennyson’s ‘Tears, Idle Tears’ and two extracts from The Tempest, Ariel’s Song and Juno’s Song. Janet Oppenheim (1991: 134) contends that water therapy was seen as particularly appropriate for cases difficult to diagnose conclusively, such as nervous and gynaecological complaints. McDougall draws an important distinction between hysterical symptoms which rarely cause irreversible bodily impairment and psychosomatic illness that represents a somatic expression of an emotional response and that may result in physiological damage (1989: 16–18, 28–30). Although some of those closest to Morris (such as Frederick Ellis and Sydney Cockerell; see BL, Add. 52738) advised Jane that it would be advisable to omit any reference to epilepsy, both Jane and May Morris initially approved Mackail’s inclusion of it in the context of Morris family life. In a subsequent letter to Cockerell, however, Jane outlined a more complex consideration of the matter, weighing up the views of trusted friends as well as Jenny’s welfare: ‘I also strongly objected at first to the illness being mentioned at all and then after reflection I consented, of course if I had believed for a moment that Jenny herself would mind, I should have refused. Now as you all think there is a chance of her being vexed I have given in entirely to the general opinion and have written to J.W.M. [i.e. Mackail] begging him to cancel the sheet if printed, and to say less about the illness generally’ (H&F, 23 February 1899). MacCarthy may state that ‘The effects of his invalid household upon Morris were complex and far-reaching’, citing Shaw’s hypothesis that Morris felt burdened by a sense of responsibility for Jenny’s epilepsy (1994: xiii), but she affords no such understanding to Jane. Henderson makes a similar point, noting that Jane ‘only seems to have been well in her husband’s absence’ (1967: 143). In 1880, Rossetti sent Jane a bottle of ‘Chlorodyne’, an anodyne based on chloroform and morphia, which he recommended for her neuralgia. Jane, however, diplomatically declined the medication, writing in reply, ‘the medicine I am glad to see shows your kind thoughts for me as ever, but indeed I will take nothing of the nature of an opiate’ (Bryson 1976: 132).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 81

18/03/2013 15:50

82

Jane Morris

13. Jane’s lightness of tone in such matters with Rossetti may also mark a continuation of a strategy adopted, at the advice of Rossetti’s doctor, during Gabriel’s recovery from breakdown in 1872. ‘May I further take the liberty,’ Dr Hake had written to her then, ‘of asking you to be very guarded in your reply to him – telling him only amusing and cheering facts, not noticing in the slightest degree his delusion if he has manifested any to you’ (PP, c. 13 August 1872).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 82

18/03/2013 15:50

Chapter 3

Class

If Mrs Morris feels ashamed of having lived in a little house among surroundings of extreme beauty before she married, all I can say is that such a feeling is to me unintelligible. J. W. Mackail (BL, Add. 52734) It appears poor Mrs Morris is perfectly miserable at her husband’s socialistic doings. Vernon Lee (Willis 1937: 219)

The story goes that Jane Morris was ‘ashamed’ of her class background and ‘miserable’ about her husband’s socialism. For William Morris’s twentieth-century Marxist biographers, this story underpinned their depiction of Jane Morris as a kind of class traitor, condemned for her apparent pretensions to middle-class respectability and repudiation of her working-class origins. In William Morris: His Life and Work, for instance, Jack Lindsay wrote of Jane: ‘She had all the aloofness and snobbism of someone who had come up from the lowest working-class levels to a high genteel status’ (1975: 288), as if ‘aloofness and snobbism’ are only tell-tale qualities of those who are not naturally entitled to ‘high genteel status’. In a similar vein, E. P. Thompson in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary depicted Jane Morris’s rise to bourgeois femininity as an inauthentic performance: she adopted the ‘airs of a Guinevere’ (1976: 158) and, ‘in her spoiled and indifferent way, was hostile to Morris’s Socialist views, activities and friends’ (1976: 167). Far from providing a plausible account of Morris’s wife, both Lindsay and Thompson naturalise class identity as fixed and irrevocable traits in their two-dimensional portrayal. It is especially ironic that Thompson, who in his landmark history sought to ‘rescue [the working class] from the enormous condescension of posterity’ (1980: 12), should in the case of Jane Morris have refused to read her story as anything other than pretension and class betrayal.1 A woman may marry up, these biographers

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 83

18/03/2013 15:50

84

Jane Morris

imply, but her past will always betray her. Social mobility through marriage remains irrecuperable as a narrative of working-class achievement. Class is everywhere and nowhere in the story of Jane Morris. In the anecdotes concerning her ‘gypsy’ appearance, her invalidism, or her inscrutability, class is rarely acknowledged or addressed directly but shadows the story at every point. The only time it is explicitly raised is in the story of her ‘discovery’ at Oxford and subsequent marriage to Morris, when class is an unavoidable aspect of the story. Once transformed from the working-class Jane Burden into the middle-class Jane Morris, however, her class of origin, like her name, is magically erased. If Jane Morris looked, spoke or acted differently from those around her, such differences are customarily explained as either personal failings or essential qualities rather than as the consequences of social mobility and the disrupted habitus that resulted (Bourdieu 2002: 27–8; Lawler 1999: 14). Instead, in the myth of Jane Morris, class is effectively disavowed or ‘affirmed in the same gesture that it is denied’ (Bronfen 1992: 70).2 In Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, for example, Georgiana Burne-Jones acknowledged the ‘humble’ origins of Jane Morris and Elizabeth Siddall but by endowing these women with a ‘natural’ nobility of character and ‘distinguished’ beauty they seemed to transcend class, ruling it out as a meaningful social category. Introducing Jane Burden as ‘born and brought up in Oxford’ (1904: 168), Georgiana wonders why William Morris did not encounter his future wife during his student days: her ‘beauty was of so rare and distinguished a type that one would have thought it impossible for Morris to have missed seeing her face during the time he was at College’ (Burne-Jones 1904: 168). One might only think it impossible if one assumed that Jane Burden and William Morris occupied a shared social domain, rather than one sharply divided by class despite physical proximity, as Georgiana would have been well aware. In early accounts of Jane Morris like this, class becomes ‘unintelligible’ in Mackail’s telling term: that is, class loses explanatory force to account for a person’s actions or circumstances other than as inherent personal qualities. Mackail’s attribution of shame to Jane Morris in the epigraph to this chapter, then, assigns a negative trait to her while eliding the cause of such a trait. Recently, however, a number of scholars have explored shame in relation to class not as an experience of personal culpability – as Mackail implies in reading such a feeling as unjustified – but as a form of cognitive dissonance registered as a negative affective response arising from dislocation or disruption. If we consider the experience of class mobility, of ‘occupy[ing] both a working-class and a middle-class habitus during the same lifetime’ (Lawler 1999: 14), as an instance of

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 84

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

85

such dislocation, we can see how ‘class shame’ may be understood in these terms as an experience of perceived exposure or vulnerability in contexts where a habitual mode of behaviour mis-aligns – or is judged to have mis-aligned – with a newer social environment (Fox 1994: 16, 13). As Rita Felski puts it, ‘The opportunities for experiencing shame increase dramatically with geographic and social mobility, which provide an infinite array of chances for failure, for betraying by word or gesture that one does not belong in one’s new environment’ (2000: 43). Lawler (1999) has described instances of profound dissonance where working-class women expressed an inability to fully reconcile the divergent locations which shaped their lives as a result of their relationships with middle-class men. In these accounts, shame is both a historically specific and a socially constituted experience; it is not simply a private, inner feeling of wrongdoing but occurs either through public exposure or through an internalised sense of public exposure (‘What would the neighbours say?’). In the case of Jane Morris, the attribution of shame problematises social mobility because it is premised on the assumption that the exposure of her early life would result in humiliation, a claim for which we lack archival evidence derived from Jane Morris herself. Rather than labelling a response to dislocation arising from social mobility as shame, this chapter will focus on social mobility as a process by which a self could be transformed and consider the consequences of such a process for the acquisition of cultural capital and the formation of political awareness.

Social Mobility and ‘rather sad lives’ Writing to Sydney Cockerell (William Morris’s executor) on 19 September 1898, a peeved Mackail sought to enlist Cockerell’s support in a dispute that had arisen over the images to be included in Mackail’s Life of William Morris: Mrs Morris objects, to me somewhat unaccountably, to the inclusion in the book of a drawing which [Edmund Hort] New has made of the bit of old Oxford (off Holywell St) in which she lived before her marriage. The suggestion of having such a drawing, & the drawing itself when it was made, were both warmly approved by Sir E. Burne-Jones, & I am rather vexed by her objecting to it. I don’t know whether she has ever discussed the matter with you. Mr Webb also has told her that he thinks it should go in, but without effect. (BL, Add. 52734, emphasis added)

This letter depicts a network of interested parties (Mackail, Burne-Jones, Webb, Cockerell) having as much right to a view of the matter as the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 85

18/03/2013 15:50

86

Jane Morris

widow herself. Jane’s dissent baffles Mackail: why would she object, when he and Webb support the inclusion of the drawing and when no less an authority than Burne-Jones had affirmed its aesthetic value? As Margaret Fleming has noted, ‘an illustration of the wife’s family home [was] not usually considered an indispensable adjunct to a biography’ (1981: 2) so why was Mackail so ‘vexed’ at Jane’s veto? Mackail’s subsequent letter to Cockerell – the letter from which this chapter’s first epigraph is taken – was written three days later, suggesting a reply from Cockerell in the interim, and sheds an interesting light on these questions. Jane’s feelings remain opaque to Mackail but he nevertheless interprets her actions in his own terms, firstly by imputing shame to Jane – only to disallow the legitimacy of such a response – and then by reconstructing her impoverished background as ‘having lived in a little house among surroundings of extreme beauty’. In this same letter, however, Mackail offers a very different interpretation of William Morris’s behaviour and the issue of shame, requiring the letter to be quoted in its entirety: 22 Sept 98 Dear Cockerell What I feel is that it does fair injustice to Morris himself to gloss over the fact that he married “beneath him” and did so with perfect simplicity & as a thing which he had no reason whatever to feel ashamed of in anyway. I have been obliged to some degree to slur it over, & the loss will be the book’s, & Mrs Morris’s own I think, if she knew it. As to the picture, it would hardly have relevance in the book unless it were explained what it represented. If Mrs Morris feels ashamed of having lived in a little house among surroundings of extreme beauty before she married, all I can say is that such a feeling is to me unintelligible. As to the sentence that she urges me to suppress in his letter to his mother I don’t feel quite so strongly, as the letter is to all intents & purposes complete without it: & I had made up my mind to accede to her wishes in that matter. Yours very truly JW Mackail. (BL, Add. 52734, original emphasis)

In this telling, Jane Morris’s lowly origins shed a positive light on the character of William Morris, imbuing him with a heroic status as a man ahead of his time, whose marriage outside his class demonstrated his refusal to truckle to convention, a depiction that is dependent on the myth of individuality so vital to concepts of bourgeois identity. Mackail’s emphatic defence of Morris assumes the complete transparency of Morris’s motives – what Mackail calls his ‘perfect simplicity’ and lack of shame – with an implied contrast to the questionable motives attributed to Jane Morris. Similarly the passive construction of the clause, ‘I have been obliged to some degree to slur it over’ has been inferred to refer to Jane Morris as the source of this obligation but,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 86

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

87

given Mackail’s resistance to her intervention in the biography, this is an assumption that may be too simple.3 Such a passive construction could imply precisely an agent-less act, a convention that Mackail chafes at but feels bound to observe nonetheless: in the light of his scare quotes around ‘beneath him’, there is a hint of ambivalence towards cross-class marriage, as if Mackail wants to distance himself from the reactionary view of hierarchical social relations that his tone might otherwise imply. Mackail’s dilemma in wanting to draw attention to Morris ‘marrying down’ perhaps reflects the difficulties in depicting cross-class marriage in this period. While we might assume that class mobility through marriage was becoming increasingly common in nineteenth-century Britain, a study of women’s marital mobility between 1839 and 1914 – dates which coincidentally match Jane Morris’s lifespan exactly – shows that upward mobility through marriage was still comparatively rare. In this study, Andrew Miles found that although ‘almost 50 per cent of women married a man whose class position was different to that of their father’s,’ lower-middle class women were more likely to marry down than working-class women to marry up (1999: 153) and working-class women ‘were 50 per cent more likely to move into the middle class than their brothers, but still only one in ten did so’ (1999: 175). Despite a rise in rates of upward mobility for working-class women over the course of this period, with marriage ‘provid[ing] the principal vehicle for their mobility’ (Miles 1999: 164, 174), Jane Morris was, then, still an exception in her lifetime.4 Just as New’s drawing for the Morris biography aestheticised the realities of Jane’s background, so too did Mackail’s defence insist that the issue was one of aesthetics, not class politics: Jane’s veto, Mackail avers, compromised the artistic integrity of his book, both text and image, and demonstrated her lack of (aesthetic) knowledge (‘if she knew it’).5 Mackail then enlisted Philip Webb, the architect of Red House and a friend of both William and Jane, to persuade Jane to change her mind about the illustration. Webb’s letters on this topic provide some of the most fascinating, if tantalising, evidence concerning the issue of class in the story of Jane Morris because, while his letters remain in existence, Jane’s replies do not. Webb, who had also grown up in Oxford, at first appealed to Jane on both historic and aesthetic grounds to allow Mackail to include the ‘little Holywell print’, judging it ‘exceedingly pretty and very well done’ (27 August 1898, BL, Add 45342): ‘This, the prettiest of all the non Kelmscott drawings, is historical, linking the Oxford part of [Morris’s] life with all the rest of it. And afterwards, there are my feelings; I always liked Holywell more than any other part of Oxford’ (19 October 1898, BL, Add 45342, original emphasis). Emphasising

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 87

18/03/2013 15:50

88

Jane Morris

the importance of an emotional connection to place, Webb interpellates Jane into a shared past, deliberately occluding the significant differences between the youthful experience of an ostler’s daughter and a doctor’s son. As a boy accompanying his father on his rounds, Webb had regularly visited the area where Jane grew up, and he reminisces about streets, gardens, and local characters before signing off ‘Your doddering old friend and fellow townsman (not gownsman)’ in a further effort to insist on their solidarity as locals. Less than a week later, however, and clearly after receiving a reply from Jane in the interval, Webb writes: My dear Janey O, dear me, what have I said? Is it that my jests are so profound that you “fail to understand a good part” of them? If that is all, I don’t mind, but I hope there was nothing in my letter which hurt you. (BL, Add. 45342)

This letter also triggered a response because a week after this, on 31 October, Webb wrote again: My dear Janey Your tenderly kind letter is very comforting to me, and I am almost glad I unwittingly gave you some pain, by urging the putting into the book the little Oxford picture, now that you have opened to me your real reason for objecting to its use there. Of course now I would be as much against putting it in as I was for it: Now that you have so lovingly written to me of your motive I think you will really like me the better for having so wished it before? I have always felt that your having been born in Oxford was a kindly tie between us, and I feel it even more now that both of our families had their rather sad lives there. Also I confess to have had pleasure in thinking of you as a child spending the unconscious part of your life in and about that region of the beautiful place, which I at my young and unconscious time, rejoiced in without really know[ing] why. I thank you for having ‘opened your heart’ to me on this point. (BL, Add. 45342)

The absence of Jane’s voice from this dialogue, conveyed only through Webb’s paraphrases or brief quotations from her preceding letter, means that Jane’s ‘real reason’ for objecting to the inclusion of the image remains unknown, although Webb’s phrase, ‘rather sad lives’, is telling, leaving a lingering impression of sorrowful associations with early life.6 Of particular interest is Webb’s choice of adverb to describe the manner of Jane’s writing to him – ‘Now that you have so lovingly written to me of your motive . . .’ – as if Jane’s disclosure was a gesture of love or intimate friendship between the two correspondents that had deeply touched Webb. The contrasting responses attributed to Jane in this sequence of correspondence regarding the inclusion of the Holywell picture – the emotional vulnerability Webb describes versus the dogged assertiveness

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 88

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

89

that so vexed Mackail – resist any simplistic explanation or singular emotional motivation. Marsh’s conclusion concerning this correspondence, that Jane simply sought to ‘forget’ her childhood and ‘suppress’ her background (2000: 245), however, seems to conflate archival silence with deliberate strategy and does not fully capture the complexity of emotional response that Webb attributed to Jane. Rather, the articulation of suffering and vulnerability to which Webb’s letter testified implies that Jane’s letter referred to a painful reminder of an earlier life, an earlier self, but the silences and gaps in this correspondence – the spaces where Jane Morris’s own expression and explanation should appear – mean that we lack the kind of evidentiary detail to make this story (and the identity at the heart of the narrative) fully coherent. Both Mackail’s frustration and Webb’s impotent sympathy reflect their respective inability to construct a narrative of Jane Morris’s (early) life that fully made sense to them. While – at least for Mackail – this points to a failure on her part (of imagination, of knowledge), it may instead tell us more about the discrepancies between working-class and middle-class life narratives in this period. As Regenia Gagnier has argued, Victorian working-class autobiographies differed markedly from typically middle-class life stories: they do not begin with extended accounts of childhood but with fragments from a truncated early life (1991: 43). Jane Morris’s rare reported recollections of her early life are fragmentary in this way, in contrast to Webb’s attempt to impose a (middle-class) nostalgic account of childhood that included Jane.7 Even in Webb’s reference to their ‘rather sad lives’ at Oxford, it is impossible to know if this was a response to Jane’s disclosure of personal traumas of family life or whether, again, Webb was seeking to create an equivalence of experience between the two that transcended class; as if, contra Tolstoy, all unhappy families are alike. Similarly, if less sensitively, Mackail’s astonishment at what he can only identify as Jane Morris’s shame springs from the biographer’s preference for a coherent narrative of his subject, in which Jane Morris must play the part he has assigned her as an emblem of Morris’s egalitarian virtues and authentic dignity. The correspondence of Mackail and Webb, then, marks the beginning of a pattern of obfuscation or disavowal of class that has filled the space left by the absence of Jane Morris’s epistolary voice with a projection of a woman motivated by shame or suffering to conceal her past. Webb’s confession of the pleasure he had derived from imagining Jane’s childhood demonstrates that even those closest to her were not immune from aestheticising her – she was so often a figure of fantasy for others to imagine in a range of scenarios of their own devising. So how might these fraught attributions of shame and sorrow in relation to

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 89

18/03/2013 15:50

90

Jane Morris

Jane Morris’s shifting class status be re-interpreted? If Jane Morris was reticent about her early life in Oxford, did it derive (as Mackail believed) from shame over her lowly origins, or (as Webb implies) from pain associated with the specific circumstances of the Burden family? Was it feelings or facts about her early life that Jane Morris did not readily disclose? And is it possible to refuse either a romanticisation of her past or the attribution of snobbery and shame that some have seen as the consequence of Jane Morris’s social mobility? One avenue to an alternative interpretation of Jane Morris’s life narrative may be opened up by thinking through the implications of Bourdieu’s concept of habitus as ‘embodied history, internalised as a second nature and so forgotten as history’ (Bourdieu 1990: 56) to provide a dynamic account of the relation between class, social formations and personal identity. Such a concept accommodates the interplay of past and present experience in a person’s life, acknowledging the continuing significance of early life for the behaviour, attitudes and dispositions of the adult subject, without relying solely on individual agency to account for a person’s self-understanding or structures of feeling. Habitus, that is, is premised on the reflexive inter-relation between an interior sense of self and the changing social contexts in which the self moves or is located. By contrast, in aestheticising – and thus dehistoricising – Jane Morris’s past in different ways, both Mackail and Webb obscured the processes of social mobility and mis-interpreted her temperament, feelings and responses in the present they shared with her. Much subsequent scholarship has similarly failed to historicise the transformation of habitus in the life of Jane Morris. Roger C. Lewis, for instance, speculated that Jane Morris finally ended her relationship with Rossetti because ‘she was too fond of respectability and security to risk an open break with her husband in order to live permanently with Rossetti’ (Fredeman vol. VI, 2006: 583). ‘Fondness’ seems a trivialising term here that belittles what the weight of ‘respectability and security’ might have meant for one raised in a household of precarious finances and status. As both Steedman (1987) and Fox (1994: 98–9) have noted in different contexts, the power of the value of respectability in the lives of working-class women was closely connected to the fragility of privacy and the threat of exposure to public scrutiny, whether through gossip, the observation of neighbours, or (in the twentieth century) state surveillance. The luxury of privacy that came with the comforts of a middleclass home, then, cannot be so easily dismissed as a superficial motive for retaining the social position that her marriage had bestowed. Even in Marsh’s often-sympathetic biographical account of Jane Morris, classed assumptions intrude in a way that simplifies the complex amalgam of

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 90

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

91

class and gender identity in the life of her subject. Trying to understand Jane’s motives in marrying William, Marsh introduces class difference as a factor of significance only to perpetuate value-laden class attitudes. William, Marsh notes, ‘neither drank nor beat her, as a husband from her own class might have done’ (2000: 63). This taken-for-granted association between working-class masculinity and violence, premised on a Ruskinian image of the middle-class home as a safe haven for women, naturalises middle-class identity as both virtuous (our husbands do not beat their wives) and coherent (our actions are not unintelligible). We will probably never know if Jane Morris’s childhood was marred by domestic violence (her father’s arrest for assault is often taken as evidence for this; see Marsh 2000: 6), just as we will probably never know her ‘real reason’ for refusing the inclusion of the Holywell image. As Steedman (1987) has described, the consequences of early experiences of deprivation may be multifarious but so are the alternatives, although only certain forms of escape may have been championed in cultural narratives. Stories of the self-made working man, rising above straitened circumstances through education or hard work, for instance, is one culturally-valorised story of masculine escape. The working-class woman for whom escape is connected with the desire ‘for and envy of, respectability and material goods’, by contrast, has been condemned ‘as apolitical, trivial, pretentious’ (Lawler 1999: 12). Instead of reading Jane Morris’s escape from dispossession and deprivation as a source of lingering shame and defensive respectability, it is possible to re-frame this aspect of her story as a narrative of successful acquisition of cultural capital. Jane Morris did not simply have a higher social status bestowed on her once for all through her marriage but embarked on a process of the re-making of habitus that involved both the acquisition of new skills and knowledge and the related development of an altered sense of self. What is missing from both Lewis and Marsh’s explanation of Jane Morris’s motives and actions is a nuanced account of agency, class and gender, or the diverse ways in which identity derives from habitus. How a person behaves, feels, or perceives the world and her place in it is shaped by the conflicting interplay of past and present experience, enacted in specific social locations, at specific moments, resulting either in an innovative adaptation to new circumstances or a repetition of already-acquired strategies of behaviour, sometimes successful, sometimes not. Whether seeking to explain Jane’s acceptance of William Morris’s proposal, her decision to part from Rossetti, or her refusal to have the Holywell picture included in the Life of William Morris, then, we cannot hope to arrive at an explanation that assumes such actions to have a single, transparent motivation, free from the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 91

18/03/2013 15:50

92

Jane Morris

burden of embodied history. We can only understand such actions as resulting from an accretion of experience that imbricates past and present in possibly contradictory or painful ways in specific moments of crisis or opportunity, even if much of this process remains invisible and probably unrecoverable to scholars through an absence of archival traces. To assume that historical subjects always achieved a coherence of motive, self-understanding and social performance that can be re-told as a straightforward biographical narrative is as naïve as to imagine that our own thoughts and behaviour are always consistent or transparent to ourselves. For a historical subject undergoing a rapid process of social mobility, adapting to a higher social status would have involved a range of embodied alterations – of speech, dress, comportment, for instance – in order to inhabit a new social milieu. Such alterations would also have meant repeated opportunities for failure, mistake, or exposure but no recorded instances of breaches of social etiquette by Jane Morris survive. Did Jane inhabit middle-class subjectivity so thoroughly as to leave no trace of her upbringing? Or was it simply a case of a polite reticence that left such moments unrecorded by contemporaries? Did Jane Morris, for instance, ever betray her outsider status by the trace of a regional accent, by a hesitant or too-careful articulation? No one says so. It is true that there is an occasional reference to her tone of voice or her ‘delicious chuckling laugh’ (Swanwick 1935: 101) but her accent remains a mystery to us. Of course the social circles in which she moved involved a wide range of social actors, of varying classes and place of origin, each, that is, with their own ‘sedimented histories’ of embodiment. By nature of its avant-gardist tendencies, this social network represented a polyglot of voices as well as views that would not conform to a period-drama depiction of received pronunciation in the Victorian drawing room but would have included diverse accents, languages and modes of social interaction reflecting the relative heterogeneity of the Morris circle. The question still remains, however, as to why her social transformation was so unremarkable, in the literal sense that it was not remarked upon in written accounts by her contemporaries? Perhaps one of the reasons Jane Morris’s experience of social mobility has been so little understood is that the period of her preparation for her new role – during her engagement – has left no significant archival record or narrative.8 It has been assumed that she underwent some kind of training or education between 1858 and her wedding in 1859; Jane Morris possessed a proficiency in music (piano and, in later life, mandolin9) and French, for instance, that cannot have been part of the rudimentary schooling of the young Jane Burden. Her later letters also

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 92

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

93

attest to her abilities in Italian, a learning process that may have begun during her engagement but which she certainly continued during her first visits to Italy (asking Rossetti’s advice on hiring a teacher there, for instance; Bryson 1976: 43). Jane later wrote to Blunt translating events she had witnessed in Italian piazze so it is hard to know the degree of self-deprecation that was behind Jane’s statement to Rosalind Howard prior to her first Italian visit in 1877 that ‘although I knew Italian tolerably well once, I have forgotten much’ (CH, J22/55/3).10 Although Italy was a favoured destination for Victorian travellers, a knowledge of the language was not common so Jane Morris’s proficiency would have been somewhat unusual.11 Theodore Watts-Dunton went so far as to claim that Jane was ‘superior to Morris intellectually, she reached a greater mental height than he was capable of, yet few knew it’ and pointed to the ‘ease and facility’ with which she had acquired languages and the speed with which she had compensated for her lack of education after her engagement to Morris (Watts-Dunton 1916: 10).12 William Rothenstein, who only became acquainted with Jane Morris in her later life, recalled her as ‘an admirable talker, wholly without self-consciousness, always gracious, and in her person beautifully dignified . . . Women married to famous men are over-shadowed by their husbands; but when they survive their husbands, there comes sometimes a late flowering, previously, perhaps, held in check’ (1931: 288). Rothenstein’s vignette of an accomplished, articulate woman is notable not only for his repudiation of the ‘silent muse’ myth but for his sensitivity to the gendered restraints that women like Jane Morris may have experienced. For many contemporary observers, Jane Morris was a living tableau but Rothenstein presents a historicised subject who consciously changed and developed over the course of her lifetime. Jane Morris’s upward mobility would also have required the acquisition of middle-class feminine skills associated with household management and raises the question of her treatment of domestic staff within the household. In her fascinating study, Mrs Woolf and the Servants, Alison Light observed: ‘it’s hard to resist the conclusion that the history of service is the history of British women. Millions of women had either been servants at some point in their lives or kept servants’ (2007: xv, original emphasis). How many women, however, even in the nineteenth century, had occupied both roles in their lifetime? It is not known with certainty if Jane Burden had engaged in domestic service prior to her engagement to William Morris but it was not unusual for workingclass girls to begin some form of paid domestic labour from the age of fourteen. The complex loyalties, conflicts and intimacies between servants and employers – conveyed so insightfully by Light in examining

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 93

18/03/2013 15:50

94

Jane Morris

the fraught relations between Virginia Woolf and her domestic staff – is difficult to re-capture but seems particularly relevant to consider in instances of socially-mobile wives. Little trace remains, however, of Jane Morris’s relations with her servants: in 1878 she solicitously described bringing a young Florentine woman back from Italy to train in domestic service and embroidery (CH, J22/55/4); and Floss Gunner, employed by the Morrises between 1891 and 1896 and interviewed in the mid-1960s, spoke warmly of her former employer, despite the drudgery and belowstairs hierarchy that Gunner reported in both Kelmscott households. Gunner described Jane Morris as ‘very handsome and very nice’ and recounted her reluctance to leave her when, after the death of William Morris, Jane asked her to accompany her to Egypt (on a visit to the Blunts): ‘She was going to Egypt for six months and she terribly wanted me to go with her, but my father wouldn’t let me; he thought I was too young. It was a pity’ (Lawson 1965: 15). Gunner does not convey any sense of a mistress who was exceptional within the parameters of class relations at the time or awkward in her social role, concluding simply that ‘The Victorian age was another world really’ (Lawson 1965: 16), thus naturalising the social divide between employers and employees.13 Towards the end of her life, Jane Morris wrote to Crom Price with a greater degree of frankness regarding her servants, describing how, having discharged the couple who had worked at Kelmscott Manor (on the grounds of incompetence and the suspicion of drinking), she was acquainting herself with a ‘promising’ new cook (‘she can make bread at any rate, and is clean’) and gardener – ‘such nice people’ (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 365, 400). After almost fifty years as a middle-class domestic manager, that is, Jane Morris seemed entirely comfortable in the role and, like her socialist husband, did not recognise any problematic contradiction between holding progressive political views and employing the labour of others. Jane Morris’s reputation for hospitality and house-keeping – a subject to which I will return in Chapter 5 – certainly suggests that her guests observed no failings in her arts of domestic management. Helena Swanwick, for example, later fondly recalled the wholesome simplicity of the Morris home as due to Jane’s influence (although, in the process, Swanwick rendered the servants’ labour invisible): ‘I delighted in the trestle-table, . . . scoured grey-white with sand, the blue crockery on the dresser, the honey and home-made bread and the exquisite cleanliness of the whole house (for Mrs. Morris was a notable housewife)’ (1935: 101). Whatever domestic skills that Jane Morris had acquired in her childhood home and schooling aimed at equipping workingclass girls for domestic service would have been supplemented by the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 94

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

95

conventions and practices required of a middle-class matron, although no vestigial record remains of how or where this training occurred. In the performance of feminine domesticity, nevertheless, past and present experience was entwined to a degree to form a new identity as a hostess and domestic manager. The association that was often drawn between simplicity and Jane Morris’s domestic style may hint at a residual frugal approach to housekeeping she had learned in early life and that was able to be neatly combined with William Morris’s aesthetic of beautiful utility to produce a unique home environment (discussed further in Chapter 5). In the remainder of this section, however, I want to focus on another distinctive aspect of Jane’s daily life where her past and present were imbricated to contribute to the formation of a new identity marked by intellectual and aesthetic self-development: her passion for reading. Far from disguising her working-class past, her love of reading marked a significant commonality with autodidactic working-class men and women for whom reading was a highly-valued means of transcending the limitations of their situation and contributed to a lifelong learning process (Gagnier 1991: 43). We can only speculate that Jane Morris’s childhood was characterised by textual impoverishment in a relatively illiterate household14 but in a letter to Rossetti in 1878, Jane noted that ‘I still keep up my old habit of reading every scrap that comes in my way’ (Bryson 1976: 80), a remark that evokes a scarcity of reading material in early life that motivated a voracity for reading twenty years after her marriage. Jane Morris’s constant reading echoes the experience of many of the autodidacts described by Rose (2001), Mays (2008) and Gagnier (1991) in their respective studies of nineteenth-century working-class self-formation where the desire for texts – whether entertaining or instructive – was a powerful drive for subjects who felt they could never make up for the literary deprivations of early life and for whom books were associated with autonomy, escape or betterment in various forms. Such stories of ‘liberation via literacy’ also associated reading with a form of emotional emancipation, through fostering an autonomous interiority that was sharply distinguished from the economic dependence and self-abnegation the writers associated with wage-slavery (Mays 2008: 344, 345). For working-class readers in this period, Mays contends, reading could be a collective or public experience but was also an activity crucial to the development of an internalised sense of self and agency (2008: 347–8). The solitude and space necessary for the cultivation of such an interiority derived from reading was, however, differently understood by men in waged labour and women primarily responsible for domestic labour (Mays 2008: 345, 347). As Mays notes, many working-class women’s

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 95

18/03/2013 15:50

96

Jane Morris

narratives ambivalently represented ‘reading as always demanding forms of privacy and secrecy that exclude the family and induce feelings of worry and guilt rather than pride’ (2008: 355). A desire to cultivate reading, linked to a ‘desire for private space and time, solitude, and silence’, could be a source of familial conflict, especially for women who felt a discrepancy between their own opportunities and those presented to their brothers, or whose mothers valued feminine domestic skills over scholarship (Mays 2008: 347, 353–5). A woman from the working class who acquired through marriage the ideal environment for private reading, then, may have experienced a form of liberation or autonomy that was all the more valued for the contrast to earlier experience it represented. The frequency with which books are mentioned and the diversity of reading represented in Jane Morris’s correspondence with Rossetti, Blunt, Webb and Cockerell provide a picture of her as an avid reader, consuming poetry, biography, journals, fiction and essays as well as daily newspapers and periodical literature. In November 1875, Rossetti wrote to his mother from Bognor requesting her to send books – ‘Reading is very scarce here’ – to be shared with Jane Morris, who would be lodging nearby while modelling for Astarte Syriaca: Mrs Morris has I believe returned you the D’Arblay with which she was more delighted than I think I ever knew her to be with any book. She has now got Evelina. I told her you had many amusing ones & would probably lend some to an honest borrower, but I fancy she is shy of asking. (Fredeman vol. VII, 2008: 125)

Writing to his mother again at the end of the month, however, Rossetti is critical of the books he has received: The books you sent Mrs Morris are in perfect safety at her house but with the exception of Louis XIV (and that she already knew much by other books), the selection was not a lucky one for her, as she takes no interest whatever in the Royal Family & Vicar of Wakefield & Macaulay’s Lays had long been known to her. The D’Arblay book was new to her & a great boon & she has since read Evelina (of which in these glutted days a new railway edition has nevertheless just appeared) with great pleasure. (Fredeman vol. VII: 150)

Rossetti’s repeated assurances of Jane’s enthusiasm for Burney’s Evelina and her diaries (published as The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay and reprinted many times by 1875) may have mollified his mother for his sharp criticism of her other selections but it also emphasised Jane Morris’s cultural capital (she has already read much of what has been sent) and literary taste. Jane’s interest in the works of Fanny Burney seems particularly apposite. Burney’s books often described an

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 96

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

97

aristocratic milieu but her observations of the difficulties of women negotiating space and agency within the confines of class and gender hierarchies may have provided an imaginative resource for Jane Morris. In Evelina, for instance, Burney’s ambivalent depictions of the possibilities and pitfalls associated with ‘a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World’ (in the words of the novel’s subtitle) represent social mobility as an active process, requiring and inscribing bodily transformations – of dress, voice, demeanour and gesture. Rossetti’s defence of Jane Morris’s breadth of literary knowledge was no exaggeration. Remarks taken out of context from the Rossetti correspondence have been interpreted as Jane being unsympathetic to poetry but her letters reveal a sustained interest in the work of Coleridge and Dante, among others.15 She also discussed a wide range of biographical literature, such as memoirs, correspondence and journals (including Boswell, Vasari, Walpole, Scott, Balzac), and a diverse mix of fiction. She liked Samuel Richardson as well as Burney and, among contemporary novelists, liked George Meredith (Faulkner 1986: 97) but disliked Mary Ward’s The History of David Grieve (1892), which ‘seemed to me a laboured and unnatural description of a number of excessively disagreeable people, about whom I did not feel interested’ (Faulkner 1986: 4). While her letters to Blunt may at times have had an aspirational quality – discussing people, events and books in which she assumes he will take an interest and showing herself informed on such matters – she did not scruple to disclose that she also read popular literature, although she often noted it had disappointed her or been a diversion when nothing else was to hand. In fact, throughout her correspondence there is an almost insatiable need for books; whether at home or away, there are repeated requests for books to be sent, returned, or recommended, as well as accounts of a second reading of favourite books, and there is no surer sign of serious ill health than when Jane Morris reports she has been unable to read (‘I must not read much, it is a great privation, I am used to reading in bed . . . but this is strictly forbidden to me now by all:powerful doctors’; Faulkner 1986: 6). The value of reading in the everyday life of Jane Morris was also given a more material form in the keepsake books she made (three are now held in the British Library while a fourth paper booklet, a gift to Rosalind Howard, is in the Castle Howard Archives). While these handmade books are also evidence of Jane Morris’s aesthetic labours (to be discussed further in Chapter 5), they are relevant here in the context of their maker’s self-formation as a reading subject. These books included a wide range of quotations – from late-medieval or Romantic verse, in French and Italian as well as English, from contemporaries like Ruskin,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 97

18/03/2013 15:50

98

Jane Morris

Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Swinburne and Vernon Lee, as well as aphorisms and nursery rhymes. In one of these books, bound in red leather, Jane Morris copied the following quotation from Ruskin: There is a society continually open to us, of people who will talk to us as long as we like, whatever our rank or occupation: talk to us in the best words they can choose, and with thanks if we listen to them. And this society, because it is so numerous and so gentle, – and can be kept waiting round us all day long, not to grant audience, but to gain it, – kings and statesmen lingering patiently in those plainly furnished and narrow ante-rooms, our book-case shelves, – we make no account of that company, – perhaps never listen to a word they would say all day long. (BL, Add 45351A)

Originally presented as a lecture in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute in Manchester in 1864 (and subsequently the first essay in Sesame: Of Kings’ Treasuries), Ruskin’s plea for the value of books and literature as a democratising form of sociality may have spoken powerfully to a working-class reader whose aspirations had been a source of isolation in early life. It is a quotation that foregrounded the significance of the reading self and the red keepsake book is notable for the number of extracts that relate to the value and pleasures of reading.16 As Stephen Colclough reminds us, the transcription of a text within a commonplace book is an intensive reading experience: the choice and isolation of short passages from longer texts require close and careful attention, as the reader re-makes the text for her own purposes (1998: 18–19). The conscious re-making of a self, from an upbringing deprived of literature and education to a life rich in cultural, as well as financial capital, is given material form in these hand-made objects. Not only does the reader remake the text in these books but the text re-makes the reader, as a powerful device of self-formation that links agency, education and cultural capital. If Jane Morris was not a ‘self-made’ woman in the commonsense (and commonly gendered) understanding of the term, she was nonetheless a ‘self-made reader’, to use Richard Altick’s term (1957: 240). For Jane Morris, reading seems to have been a constant solace in her life as well as a powerful means of connection with others. The significance she placed on reading as a community activity, for instance, was demonstrated in a letter she wrote to Sydney Cockerell in 1897, about the ‘possibilities of founding a sort of club-village reading room’ in Kelmscott (H&F). While Jane Morris would later commission two cottages (designed by Philip Webb) to be built in Kelmscott in memory of her husband, it is interesting that the reading-room plan seems to have been her first idea and in 1904 she reported that ‘I have started a little Reading Room in one of my cottages. A great success’ (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 375).17 Jane Morris also described to Blunt a paucity of books at

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 98

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

99

Kelmscott Manor during her husband’s lifetime: ‘we have been rather excited by putting up a new book:case to hold what I call reading-books. Several “friends” have complained of the dearth of books to read in this literary man’s house’ (Faulkner 1986: 93). For her, it is clear, books were not merely aesthetic objects but ‘reading-books’, forming a vital part of the everyday spaces and practices shared by family and friends. There could, it seems, never be enough books in her life. Reading, then, provides a cogent example of both continuities and disruptions in Jane Morris’s life: it linked her with working-class autodidacts and middleclass literati, it provided her with a means of fostering an enriched inner life, while also facilitating conversation and companionship with her many correspondents, acquaintances and friends. As an important aspect of the cultural capital that she acquired, reading and a belief in the value of literature derived from her early experience continued to shape her identity and sense of self within the social milieu of her adult life. An image of a woman motivated by shame to maintain middleclass respectability, then, is at odds with the evidence of Jane Morris’s correspondence and keepsake books of a reading and writing subject fashioning an autonomous interiority from the rich cultural resources opened up to her through social mobility.

Politics and ‘Socialism on the brain’ Vernon Lee’s report of Jane Morris’s misery over her husband’s socialism, however, has sometimes formed part of an unflattering picture which links Jane Morris’s cultivation of cultural capital with her hostility to grubby politics, a view notably propagated by George Bernard Shaw. ‘I knew,’ Shaw wrote, ‘that the sudden eruption into her temple of beauty, with its Pre-Raphaelite priests, of the proletarian comrades who began to infest the premises as Morris’s fellow-Socialists, must be horribly disagreeable to her’ (1936: xxiv). While William Morris’s commitment to both the ‘beauty of life’ and a radical political agenda has been accommodated by biographers as reflecting the complexity and breadth of interest of a remarkable man, the view of Jane Morris as alienated, both by temperament and inclination, from the political dialogues that took place in her home has become entrenched in many biographies of Morris and Rossetti, underpinned by the apparent authority of Shaw and Lee.18 Vernon Lee’s claim that Morris’s socialism was making Jane ‘miserable’ seemed to corroborate Shaw’s view of Jane’s politics but the status of Lee’s letter is far from straightforward. Lee’s extended visits to

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 99

18/03/2013 15:50

100

Jane Morris

London in the 1880s were opportunities to penetrate the inner circles of literary and artistic London and her letters home to her mother in Italy often portrayed an image of a young writer eager to gain acceptance and recognition among the metropolitan cognoscenti. As a cultural outsider in fin-de-siècle London to a degree, Lee seems at times to have misinterpreted social encounters or misjudged the degree of intimacy she had gained with London acquaintances, as her surprise over the furore caused by the publication in 1884 of her novel Miss Brown suggests.19 Lee’s account of Jane Morris should, then, be read in the context of Lee’s somewhat precarious social position. Writing from England to her mother in mid-1886, Lee disclosed: Fancy, Bertha Newcombe and Phyllis Ellis . . . gave me the sort of sequel to Miss Brown. It appears Mrs Morris is perfectly miserable at her husband’s socialistic doings, and has vainly done all she could to keep her daughter May out of the company of Morris’s scallywags; and now May has engaged herself to a man whom even the socialists think a tarnished person, & who talks of “splitting the throats of the rich.” (29 June 1886; Willis 1937: 219)

Lee’s letter interweaves her own fictionalised narrative of Jane Morris (a ‘sort of sequel to Miss Brown’) with gossip gleaned from Phyllis Ellis (wife of the publisher and co-tenant of Kelmscott Manor, Frederick Ellis) and Bertha Newcombe (artist, suffragist, and fellow-Fabian with Shaw). As a Fabian, Newcombe may well have provided a negative account of more revolutionary forms of socialism (and hence had no reason to provide a flattering report of Harry Sparling, May’s fiancé) while Jane’s misgivings about May’s engagement were probably known to the Ellises. In letters to close friends, Jane Morris had expressed her objections to May’s engagement on the grounds of the couple’s temperamental compatibility and May’s lack of preparedness for the financial hardship that would follow her marriage. Writing to Rosalind Howard in August 1887, for example, Jane disclosed: May is away at Kelmscott Manor alone learning cooking and how to live on a few shillings a week. She is bent on marrying without waiting till her future husband gets employment. I have said and done all I can to dissuade her, but she is a fool, and persists. (CH, J22/55/7)20

Two years later, Jane wrote to Blunt in early 1889: ‘May is not married yet, but I suppose the dreadful ceremony will have to take place before very long. I don’t mind confessing that I hate parting with her’ (Faulkner 1986: 26). In a letter written after May’s separation from Sparling, Jane also strongly implied (through her usage of the first-person plural) that her husband had shared her misgivings about his daughter’s marriage, confiding to Blunt:

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 100

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

101

I have been in a heart-broken condition. May’s married life has come to an end, and although we always expected some catastrophe or other in that direction, the blow is no less heavy now it has come. We have not spoken of it yet outside the family. (Faulkner 1986: 86–7)

Vernon Lee’s letter, then, reported Jane Morris’s antipathy to Sparling as evidence of Jane’s political views rather than as personal misgivings or sorrow about her daughter’s difficulties and, as in other negative depictions of Jane’s response to Morris’s socialism, results in a conflation of socialism and specific socialists. In a curious reversal of the tendency noted in relation to class in representations of Jane Morris – where the social formation of class was reduced to, and explained in terms of, the purely personal – with regard to politics, Jane Morris’s feelings towards specific individuals have been read as an indication of her general political outlook. Even MacCarthy, who asserted that the Morrises ‘shared [a] political awareness’, still maintained that ‘Janey, by temperament, was not a political person . . . She was bound to respond with mild exasperation to her husband’s intense preoccupation with the class she herself had risen up from’ (1994: 304, 492, emphasis added). So why has the myth of a politically disengaged Jane Morris been so widely accepted? The first reason, I believe, is the inclination of biographers and scholars to refract her life through the men to whom she was close – Morris, Rossetti and Blunt. There has been a tendency, for instance, to read the marital estrangement of the Morrises into every aspect of their relationship as confirmation of their fundamental incompatibility. If William was a socialist, then, Jane must have been conservative.21 Even William’s inclusion of political discussion in his letters to his wife has been interpreted as further evidence of the rift in their relationship by Norman Kelvin (1999) who argued that the space devoted to political issues in correspondence with Jane was due to William’s inability to communicate more personally and honestly with his wife, rather than the more obvious inference of common ground between the couple. At the same time, however, Rossetti’s declared lack of interest in politics (‘I have never read a parliamentary debate in my life’, he claimed; Bryson 1976: 139), together with his mocking of Morris’s political commitment in letters to Jane, has been construed to mean that Jane shared Rossetti’s political disengagement or conservatism but a little-regarded episode from their correspondence suggests otherwise. In February 1880, Rossetti wrote to Jane about a lecture on art and politics by Hall Caine, which Caine proposed to publish and dedicate to Rossetti. ‘I don’t know whether it wd interest you to read a lecture on Politics and Art?’ Rossetti wrote but he enclosed it anyway, ‘as half your friends are named in it’ (15 February 1880; Bryson 1976:

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 101

18/03/2013 15:50

102

Jane Morris

139). In this lecture, according to Rossetti, Caine provided an ‘excellent’ political account and associated Rossetti with ‘working man Toryism,’ causing Rossetti to remark: ‘I did not know I was a Tory’ (Bryson 1976: 139, original emphasis). Unfortunately, Jane’s reply is lost but Rossetti writes to her again a week later in much cooler terms regarding Caine’s lecture and asks, ‘You don’t really consider me a Tory do you?’ (Bryson 1976: 141). What has happened in the interim to account for this shift of tone and anxious questioning? Rossetti’s chastened response suggests that Jane’s letter had offered a frank and unflattering dissection of Rossetti’s politics and of Toryism; in any case, Rossetti’s abrupt change of heart concerning Caine’s essay strongly implied that Jane had taken issue with ‘working man Toryism’ and disapproved of Rossetti’s association with such a position. Jane Morris’s relationship with Wilfrid Blunt, and the strong interest her letters display in his various political campaigns and causes, may also seem at first glance evidence of her politically conservative sympathies, given that Blunt stood (unsuccessfully) as a Conservative candidate for the seat of Camberwell North and moved in an aristocratic milieu through his marriage to Lady Anne King. Blunt’s politics, however, were not straightforwardly Tory: his imprisonment in Ireland for Home-Rule campaigning and his anti-imperialist advocacy of Egyptian self-government demonstrate that he cannot simply be pigeon-holed as a Queen-and-country conservative. Indeed, the first letter that remains of Jane’s correspondence with Blunt seeks to solicit a contribution from him for the socialist magazine, Today (6 July 1883; Faulkner 1986: 2). If Jane was as hostile to socialism as has been assumed such a letter could have tactfully indicated her affinity with Blunt, whom she clearly already knew had no sympathy with her husband’s cause. ‘Will you write an article on Egypt for the Socialistic Magazine ‘ToDay’?’ she asked: It would not necessitate your being a Socialist, or expressing Socialistic opinions in any way (all such things being distasteful to you, I know;) only as you are better acquainted with Egyptian matters than anyone else, and care so much about the subject, you could do easily and well what others would have to do more or less incompletely. I send a copy of the July number of ‘ToDay’, to show its nature. When are you coming to see me again? (Faulkner 1986: 2)

It could uncharitably be assumed that she used the commission as a pretext to initiate correspondence with Blunt but, whatever else her relationship with Blunt sustained, Jane Morris also seems to have viewed him as a correspondent with whom she could share strong antiimperialist and anti-militarist sentiments. In a letter written from Italy in February 1885 (during the British campaign in Sudan), for instance,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 102

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

103

she despaired: ‘it makes one miserable to look at the newspapers, they are one and all disgusting, talking of the honour of England as if there is nothing else in the world worthy of thought’ (Faulkner 1986: 5). Her next letter continued this theme, as well as disclosing her reliance on snippets of British political news from (often inaccurate) reports in the Italian newspapers, ‘as we don’t receive our English papers till two days late’, suggesting her eagerness to remain abreast of political developments while abroad: We have great excitement and amusement here in the way of politics, I get the telegrams in the Italian daily papers of the wildest kind, two last week were “Lord Wolseley has committed suicide to prevent himself falling into the hands of the Mahdi” “The English Government has resigned,” . . . you can imagine the excitement I never thought for one moment that Gladstone would resign. (Faulkner 1986: 6)

The recurring topics of Egypt and Ireland are particularly notable in her letters to Blunt. While he was imprisoned in Ireland, she involved herself in a campaign on his behalf (noted in Egremont 1977), telling Blunt ‘if necessary I will hunt up everybody I know likely to be of service’ (Faulkner 1986: 12). She appealed, for instance, to her radical friend Jane Cobden but was well aware that ‘Swinburne is a violent unionist and would certainly refuse to write a line on the right side’ (CP, 10 January 1888). Writing to Blunt after his release while he was wintering abroad in 1888–9, Jane returned to the topic of Egypt, lamenting ‘our meddlesome intervention’ and the incipient racism on which it was based: There seems very little interest in Egyptian matters among the people I see, and most of them are on the wrong side, and talk nonsense about putting down the slave-trade, many persist in believing that all the natives are more or less engaged in it, and that they would not live at peace with other nations if they had the chance. (4 January 1889; Faulkner 1986: 25)

What are we to make, however, of Jane’s stated willingness to canvass for Blunt’s campaign as a Conservative candidate for Camberwell North? Writing from Castle Howard on 25 July 1885, Jane offered her assistance: ‘I see they have accepted you as a candidate. When do you begin canvassing? Let me know if I can help you in that – and I will with pleasure’ (Faulkner 1986: 10). Interestingly, according to Blunt’s diary, William Morris himself raised the possibility of voting Tory as a protest against the Liberals: Morris ‘hoped the Whigs would not get in with any large majority. He was inclined to vote for the Tories, but all voting was against socialistic principles’ (25 October 1885; qtd Faulkner 1986: 12). Such strategic voting was not unusual in the volatile political climate and

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 103

18/03/2013 15:50

104

Jane Morris

shifting alignments of this period and Jane Morris would not have been the only disenfranchised woman campaigning for what might seem like an uncongenial candidate.22 Political pragmatism may in fact have been the significant difference between the positions of Jane Morris and her husband, rather than a more pervasive philosophical difference. That Jane was not hostile to radical views per se but to overly-hypothetical forms of political commitment is suggested by a letter she wrote in November 1889, while a guest of the Hudson family in North Wales: My host and hostess are both young people full of philanthropic plans for the future, they started their married life with adopting eight children, they prepared a house for forty, but stopped at eight. These were poor waifs and strays they proposed to educate and send forth to the world well provided with money to teach others . . . – it is an interesting experiment and I am curious to see how it succeeds eventually, meantime I am glad to see anyone doing anything more than talking in the usual Socialistic fashion. (Faulkner 1986: 36)

While her light-hearted dismissal of socialist talk here might indicate a certain weariness with the weekly gatherings at Kelmscott House (Floss Gunner recalled that ‘When they held [socialist] meetings there any Tom, Dick, or Harry would come in and have supper . . . That made us very busy on Saturdays’; Lawson 1965: 15), Jane’s positive emphasis on practical experiments suggests an abiding concern with ‘how we might live’, to put it in terms that her husband, like other socialists of the period, would have used. A perhaps even more ambiguous reference to socialism occurred in a letter to Crom Price in 1886. As an old friend, Jane often wrote to Price in a light-hearted tone and in this letter – after referring to herself as his ‘old, bald, toothless, broken backed friend’ – she continued: I have a new disease called “Socialism on the brain.” I forget if I acquainted you with the fact before – if so pray forgive me as loss of memory is but another symptom of the same malady. (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 149)

Whether Jane was here mocking her husband’s increasing commitment to revolutionary politics, suggesting that socialism was a form of pathology, or humorously denigrating her own radicalisation is difficult to judge but the letter speaks to the preoccupations of the Morris household at this time – preoccupations, moreover, from which Jane Morris did not exclude herself. More generally, Jane Morris’s correspondence frequently conveys a sense of open-minded, intellectual curiosity about living or thinking otherwise consistent with radical thinkers or writers of her acquaintance. Jane Morris has been portrayed as anti-women’s suffrage but her

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 104

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

105

friendships with suffragists, feminists and with women who supported themselves as artists or writers suggests a strong affinity with independent, progressive women.23 The Cobden sisters, for instance, were close friends for much of her adult life; Jane had travelled with them in Italy and they were guests at Kelmscott Manor on more than one occasion (see, e.g. Faulkner 1986: 28, 33, and BL, Add. 45412). While, in later life, she expressed an antipathy towards the Pankhursts and suffragette militancy, she affirmed a belief in ‘equal rights’ between men and women, noting: ‘it is absurd that I should not have a vote while many a drunken working man has one’ (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 401). Jane’s position in relation to feminist causes is further complicated by her participation in the Maiden Tribute demonstration in August 1885. As Thomas Cobden-Sanderson recorded in his journal: On Saturday Annie and I went to the meeting for the protection of young girls, in Hyde Park. Mrs Morris was in the procession of the Ladies’ National Society [in fact, the Ladies’ National Association], and Morris was in the brake of the Socialist League. So we greeted them, and Annie sat with Morris in his cart, and in the evening we went on to supper at Kelmscott. (27 August 1885; 1922: 224)

This image of the Morrises’ participation in an event fanned by W. T. Stead’s exposé of under-age prostitution is perhaps equally surprising as an action undertaken by William as much as Jane Morris. This protest march, however, was notable for the combined participation of diverse social groups and causes, united against the perceived sexual incontinence of upper-class men. As Judith Walkowitz summed up this event: ‘For one brief moment, feminists and trade unionists joined with Anglican bishops, socialists, and nonconformist temperance advocates to protest the aristocratic corruption of young innocents’ (1992: 105). Morris had in fact also written a letter to the Pall Mall Gazette outlining the reasons for his participation, at pains to place the issue in a wider economic and political context and to differentiate his position from some of the more conservative participants: Kelsmcott House, Upper Mall, Hammersmith, August 17. Sir, – The Socialist League is going to have a platform of its own, at which I shall have to speak as in duty bound. But besides that, if you will allow me to define my position a little closer, I must say that I fear the matter is now being pushed in a wrong direction . . . I am quite sure that no legislative enactment will touch prostitution as long as the present condition of the people exists; as long, in short, as there are rich and poor classes. I think it is misleading and dangerous to put any other view than this before people, and I especially fear the very possible danger of a Puritan revival obscuring the real cause of this hideous unhappiness. Of course you will understand that I have nothing to

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 105

18/03/2013 15:50

106

Jane Morris

say against the single-heartedness of most of those engaged in the movement, and that I think that they have done good service in exposing the rottenness of society on this point. With many thanks for your kind persistence in asking me to speak, I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully, William Morris.24

Needless to say, no such account of the reasons for Jane Morris’s participation remains and Jane’s position in the procession of the predominantly middle-class Ladies’ National Association rather than the platform of the Socialist League does suggest some divergence of allegiance among the Morrises, or at least a priority given to gender over class politics, but is not conclusive of any deeper philosophical divide. What is most noteworthy is Jane’s willingness to be publicly identified with a cause that enlisted so much feminist and radical support and the image of the Morrises and Cobden-Sandersons united in a shared protest is indeed a resonant one. In Portrait of Rossetti (1964a), however, Grylls offered a devastating depiction of Jane in the 1880s as detached from both politics and marriage, consistent with that offered by E. P. Thompson and Jack Lindsay at the opening of this chapter: it is clear that from the 1880s when Morris entered upon his socialist phase, Janey’s withdrawal from him became a hostile aloofness . . . It is significant that when he travelled by rail third-class on principle she objected to being ‘scrowdged’ by the proletariat and for going second he had to apologise to his new political friends. Perhaps the groom’s daughter had been tamed all too well into a middle-class matron under the influence of the Burne-Jones’ and their set, whom she met when she was only twenty, for she was certainly conventional in her insistence on respectability. Later she disapproved of her daughter May’s marriage with one of Morris’s workmen . . . and discouraged the attentions of a penniless journalist like Bernard Shaw. (1964a: 238)

While sympathetic to the challenges faced by Jane Morris in other respects, Grylls presents another unflattering portrait of a woman ‘tamed’ by privilege and hostile to the lower classes, encapsulating here the main reason for the persistence of the myth concerning Jane Morris’s antagonism to progressive politics: the assumed shame of a woman fearful her roots were showing. It is taken for granted that the workingclass woman was unable to resist being seduced by privilege and flattery, was domesticated by convention and respectability, and hence driven by a desire to put as much distance as possible between herself and the proletariat. Details of Grylls’s depiction are easy to challenge: Harry Sparling was not a ‘workman’ of Morris’s but a comrade in the Socialist League who wrote for the Commonweal; Shaw’s unsuitability for May was something that Jane Morris would have observed over many years of volatile prevarication between the couple; and no source is offered for

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 106

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

107

the anecdote about Morris’s train travel. The charge of Jane’s succumbing to the ‘influence of the Burne-Jones’ and their set’ is also distinctly at odds with the tone and content of Jane’s letters: despite her long friendship with Georgiana Burne-Jones, for instance, Jane was still shocked by Edward’s acceptance of a knighthood, even mocking the pretensions and reactionary tendencies it implied. Burne-Jones’ baronetcy, Jane wrote to Blunt in 1894, is considered a joke by most people, we had not heard of it before seeing the announcement in the papers – my husband refused to believe it at first . . . It is all too funny, and makes one roar with laughing – I have got over the sadness of it now – it seemed to me such an insult to offer the same to a man of genius and a successful publican, and then for him to accept. (Faulkner 1986: 85)

Similarly, the charge of exacerbated estrangement in this phase of the Morris marriage is at odds with Glasier’s account of the easy intimacy of the long-married couple that he observed on more than one occasion at Kelmscott House: William, Glasier recounted, addressed Jane at dinner ‘with gentle courtesy and affection’ (1921: 48), while Jane, ‘listen[ing] with amusement to Morris’s playful chaff . . . glanced at me occasionally, as if to assure me that she was not being taken in by his stories. “He is quite naughty sometimes”, was her only remark’ (1921: 45–6). Nor was it true that Jane found all socialists ‘horribly disagreeable’, in Shaw’s phrase: she expressed a fondness for the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin in a letter to Blunt in early 1889 (‘you would like him as much as we all do’; Faulkner 1986: 26), for instance, and had warmly welcomed Bruce Glasier to her home (Glasier 1921: 45–6). If Jane Morris did not make a habit of attending political protests, her letters often refer to a daily practice of newspaper reading in which national and international politics seem to have been her chief interest. In July 1888, when, by her own admission, she was much depleted by her care of Jenny (‘my brain was suffering from it’), Jane disclosed to Blunt: ‘Public affairs are more depressing than ever, I almost hate a newspaper’ (Faulkner 1986: 18). The qualification, ‘almost’, is noteworthy here; even in personal extremity, she did not relinquish her attention to the politics of the day. Her wider reading also encompassed topics and genres that testify to an engagement in political concerns. In the winter of 1899, when Jane again confided her state of poor health (resulting again from caring for Jenny after another attack), she wrote to Blunt that she was unable to devote her usual time to reading because of impaired concentration but that she was still gripped by reading Peter Kropotkin’s Memoirs of a Revolutionist (Faulkner 1986: 115). This seems an unlikely response for a woman apparently ‘miserable’ about

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 107

18/03/2013 15:50

108

Jane Morris

her husband’s socialism or antagonistic towards the political advancement of the oppressed. Jane Morris also enjoyed reading utopian fiction, a genre often associated with radical political views during this period. In a letter to Jane written in 1878, Rossetti referred to Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) in a way that implied Jane has read the novel and had raised the topic in a previous letter (Bryson 1976: 78) and in 1889 Jane wrote to Blunt: ‘I have not been reading any new books, only some of the old ones again, among them Jefferies’ ‘After London’ which I liked better than ever. I would send you out a copy, only I fancy you must have read it’ (Faulkner 1986: 40). Richard Jefferies’ novel, After London, or Wild England (1885), was also admired by William Morris – according to Mackail, Morris ‘never wearied of praising’ it (vol. 2, 1899: 144) – and this shared interest in post-industrial fantasised futures is perhaps another little-recognised area of commonality between husband and wife. Jane’s interest in utopias, however, evidently extended beyond the literary as she also wrote to Blunt about a proposed utopian community in Mexico: I think I have never known so dark a winter – it makes me want to go to Topolobampo, perhaps you don’t know where that is – it is a new city, a modern Utopia, where everything is as it should be, an American was here the other day with plans of it (for it is not yet built) blocks of houses arranged chess:board pattern with gardens at intervals with an esplanade of many miles along the bay; all this does not sound very original in its appearance, but it will be self-governed, no police, no gaols, only nice people who want to be good, are to be admitted. I forgot to say the site is somewhere on the Mexican coast, about 1300 miles from San Francisco, and several hundred miles from most other places. Do you think it sounds inviting? (March 1889; Faulkner 1986: 27–8)

The Topolobampo scheme – ‘the last [utopian] project of the century on a grand scale’ and based on an ethos of cooperative labour and sexual equality (Holloway 1951: 216) – was the brainchild of American engineer Albert K. Owen and led to the establishment of ‘Pacific City’ with varying estimates of between 500 and over a thousand settlers, with many more subscribers providing financial support for the colony.25 Owen travelled to London to seek further funding for the foundering project (Fogarty 1990: 130) but it is not known if he was the ‘American visitor’ Jane described and there is no mention of this visit in William Morris’s remaining correspondence. The detail Jane provides shows that careful attention had been paid to the visitor’s plans but the tone of her letter is ambiguous: is it deliberately humorous, intended to amuse Blunt? Was a community of ‘only nice people who want to be good’ a

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 108

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

109

faux naïve description meant as a sly dig at utopian socialists? Or did such a scheme genuinely appeal to her? It is difficult to offer a definitive interpretation but the letter at least shows that Jane Morris was an engaged presence in the exchange of ideas that occurred so frequently in her home and suggests that, for anyone with a degree of intellectual curiosity, such an environment was a source of interest and possibility. The myth of a woman who was motivated by shame to deny her lowly origins and compensated by aligning herself with establishment values is based on partial evidence underpinned by an essentialist conception of class identification. Through drawing on a more dynamic account of the relation between an individual’s personal history and the social environment that forms the experience of class, I have re-considered Jane Morris’s class mobility as the transformation of habitus, a re-making of the self in which past and present were imbricated, altering both the performative aspects of daily social life as well as the interior sense of self. What emerges is a more complex understanding of the cultural capital she acquired, as well as the political views she espoused. If the picture is still far from comprehensive it may at least go some way to challenging the attribution of shame and misery that has previously shaped the story of class, politics and Jane Morris.

Notes 1. See also Swindells and Jardine (1990: 65–8) who argue that, in Thompson’s biography, Jane Morris’s working-class background ‘compensates’ for William Morris’s middle-class status as the living embodiment of her husband’s rejection of bourgeois class relations. I disagree, however, with their claim that Thompson entirely ‘masks’ Jane’s class by aestheticising her portrayal. Rather, the loaded terms in which Thompson describes her characteristics – aloof, discontented, histrionic – align Jane Morris with an inauthenticity and shallowness that are linked to her apparent wish to disguise her lowly origins. 2. Disavowal (also sometimes translated as ‘negation’) is described by Freud as ‘a way of taking account of what is repressed’ although it does not constitute ‘an acceptance of what is repressed’ (1925: 235–9). Disavowal, we might say, marks an intellectual acceptance of something that is denied legitimacy at a deeper level (see Bronfen 1992: 70). 3. The explicit reference in Mackail’s letter to an action of veto by Jane (‘the sentence that she urges me to suppress in his letter to his mother’) could be attributed to a range of motives on her part, such as a wish to avoid reactivating old sources of family tension, or her husband’s critical attitude towards her mother-in-law (remembering that none of Morris’s family attended his wedding), rather than simply Jane’s desire to suppress her own origins.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 109

18/03/2013 15:50

110

Jane Morris

4. In William Morris’s social network, of course, inter-class marriage – and other liaisons – were far from unusual so the reception of the BurdenMorris marriage would not have been a source of consternation among Morris’s friends in the same way it apparently was for Morris’s family. The possible exception was Swinburne but his letter to Edwin Hatch may not have been a serious objection. Describing Jane as a ‘perfect stunner’, Swinburne continued: ‘The idea of his marrying [Jane] is insane. To kiss her feet is the utmost men should dream of doing’ (17 February 1858; qtd Henderson 1967: 50). 5. Interestingly, Jane was later explicitly critical of Mackail’s aesthetic achievement in the biography, writing to Blunt: ‘Mackail is not an artist in feeling, and therefore cannot be sympathetic while writing the life of such a man’ (Faulkner 1986: 113). 6. Oddly, Fleming sees the matter as simply an error of biographical fact, disregarding the emotionally-charged tone of this correspondence: ‘neither, on the face of it, is there any reason why Jane should not have told [Mackail] the truth’, Fleming writes, ‘which was that the Burdens had only lived there since about 1857, and then in one of the little cottages behind No. 65’ (1981: 3). 7. Mackail’s notebooks recording his talks with Jane Morris while researching William’s biography, for instance, noted an early, isolated memory she had related of ‘pick[ing] violets on Iffley Rd just out of S. Clements’ (Mackail notebooks, WMG, vol. 1: 24). 8. Even her whereabouts during this period are not entirely clear although George Boyce recorded a sighting of Jane Burden in the vicinity of Oxford during her engagement, noting in his diary for 6 March 1859: ‘(At Oxford.) Crowe, Faulkner, Jones and self rowed to Godstow where we saw the “Stunner” (the future Mrs. Morris)’ (Surtees 1980: 26). 9. See, for example, Cobden-Sanderson (1969: 233). 10. She described to Blunt, for instance, a speech by a ‘travelling dentist’ who ‘spoke for about half an hour to a crowd of people, describing his early exploits, how he had lost his left arm fighting for his country with Garibaldi, and explaining the uses and virtues of various ointments and medicines he had with him in his carriage’ (20 March 1885; Faulkner 1986: 7). 11. As early as 1835, Henry Matthews noted (in Diary of an Invalid) that ‘The English abound so much in Florence, that a traveller has little occasion for any other language’ (qtd in Frawley 2004: 133) and it was still unusual during the nineteenth century for British or American visitors to mix with Italians to any great degree (Pieri 2007: 7). 12. The extent to which Watts-Dunton’s view of Jane may have derived from Rossetti is, however, difficult to ascertain. 13. Interestingly, Georgiana Burne-Jones offered an affectionate portrait of Mary Nicholson, the servant employed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in their bachelor days and known as ‘Red Lion Mary’, whom Morris taught to embroider and who seems to have almost had a collaborative relationship with Morris in early creative projects (1904: 169–72). Such attention marked something of an exception as discussion of servants was a low representational priority in Victorian biography and memoirs.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 110

18/03/2013 15:50

Class

111

14. It has been assumed that her mother was illiterate (Ann Burden registered Jane’s birth with an ‘X’ in place of a signature). See Marsh (2000: 1, 5). 15. When Rossetti sent Jane Italian translations of Christina Rossetti’s SingSong poems for children, Jane replied ‘I return the verses of Christina’s, they seem very funny as far as I can understand them, I still find difficulties with poetry, as you can imagine’ (September 1878; Bryson 1976: 80). Jane’s comment, that is, refers to her facility with Italian idiom, not with poetry per se. The other comment that has been taken to mean Jane Morris was not fond of poetry was a letter from Rossetti in which he wrote: ‘Do not say that poetry is far from you. It shd be nearest to us when we need it most, though indeed I know how difficult it sometimes is to feel this’ (10 March 1880; Bryson 1976: 16). Here, Rossetti seems to be referring to an occasion when failing health prevented Jane from reading (as his previous letter of three days earlier had also implied). 16. Keepsake books were related to the earlier tradition of the commonplace book as it evolved from the Lockean model of a disciplined record of reading to a form of miscellany that became increasingly popular in the nineteenth century (see Nussbaum 1988). A measure of this popularity was the rise of printed versions, in the form of giftbooks and annuals such as The Keepsake, which ‘became a highly profitable publishing fad of the 1820s and 30s in England as reading audiences grew’, despite the high prices charged for these heavily ornamental volumes (Ledbetter 1996: 235). 17. The first mention of her plan for workers’ cottages appears in a letter to Webb in August 1898 (BL, Add 45342), but a year earlier Jane Morris had reported to Cockerell that she had ‘had a talk with Mr Hobbs [the owner of Kelmscott Manor at that time] . . . but there appears to be little chance of any success [for the village reading room]. He has no barn he can spare and any new building in the place would be an eye-sore unless we can spend a large sum of money and much thought on it’ (13 August 1897, H&F). 18. MacCarthy is a notable exception here, observing that the myth of Jane’s antipathy to her husband’s politics was due to ‘a legend maliciously put about by Bernard Shaw, whom Janey had her own reasons to dislike’ and concluding that there is no evidence in Morris’s letters that Socialism was an issue of friction between husband and wife (1994: 492). 19. Widely perceived as a roman a clef, Lee’s novel had an eponymous working-class heroine who bears a striking resemblance to Jane Morris and other characters seemed to be based on figures familiar in the literaryartistic circles of London such as Oscar Wilde (see Ormond 1970). By September 1884, Lee was writing to reassure her mother that acquaintances who had avoided her due to their unfavourable reception of Miss Brown had begun to issue social invitations to her again: ‘so you see excepting the Rossettis [William Michael and his wife, Lucy] everyone has got over Miss Brown’ (Willis 1937: 196). There is, however, no evidence of renewed contact between Lee and Jane Morris after the publication of Miss Brown. 20. It is worth noting in passing that Jane has no qualms here about discussing impecuniousness with the affluent and titled Rosalind, an openness which is at odds with the image of Jane Morris as a woman supposedly over-compensating for humble origins by maintaining strictly conventional

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 111

18/03/2013 15:50

112

21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

Jane Morris views of social propriety (such as would inhibit discussion of personal financial matters). In fact the Morrises also seem to have shared anti-royalist views. In a letter to May Morris in which he referred to Queen Victoria as ‘Widow Guelph’, for instance, William continued: ‘Old Mrs De Morgan calls her the Empress Brown; which seems to me funny as I hope it will to Mama’ (Kelvin vol. 1, 1984: 477). The early suffragettes, for instance, most of whom had radical or liberal political allegiances, campaigned against any candidate who would not endorse women’s enfranchisement, leading in some electorates to the return of Tory candidates. One of her enduring friends, Mary de Morgan, for instance, was a member of the Women’s Franchise League. Pall Mall Gazette, 19 August 1885: 12. Available at http://www.nines. org/print_exhibit/283 (last accessed 21 January 2011). The letter is not in Kelvin (1984–7). Fogarty claims that by 1886, there were over 1,400 settlers (1990: 127, 124) while Morris and Kross put the number at nearly 500 residents by 1892, supported by over 2,000 investors who had subscribed to support the project (2004: 299; see also Trahair 1999: 301).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 112

18/03/2013 15:50

Chapter 4

Icon

unique in face and figure, she was a queen, a Proserpine, a Medusa, a Circe – but also, strangely enough, a Beatrice, a Pandora, a Virgin Mary. William Bell Scott (1892: 61)

The story goes that Jane Morris was ‘an almost legendary figure’ to behold (Rothenstein 1931: 288), ‘hard to believe in as the sight of an actual nineteenth-century Englishwoman’ (Forman 1914: 203). She was often portrayed as an isolated spectacle, distinguished by a physiognomy and style of dress that accentuated her auratic status, with the power to evoke a range of emotional responses in observers. This relentless aestheticisation of Jane Morris has served many purposes, not least to function as a kind of life writing through which the woman and the icon merged to create a seamless life narrative. Testament in part to the success of Rossetti’s ‘realist and anti-academic aspirations’ evident since the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – the belief that the individuality of the model should not be subsumed into the artist’s imaginative conception but remain identifiable in the final work (Prettejohn 2006: 28, 26) – Jane Morris seemed to many indistinguishable from the characters and the scenarios in which she was posed. Her capacity to represent apparently contradictory female types and characters from myth, history and literature was predominantly attributed to her ‘face of arcane and inexhaustible meaning’ which inspired the artistic genius of Rossetti, according to William Michael Rossetti: For a Pia, Pandora, Mariana, Proserpine, Venus Astarte, or Mnemosyne, there was hardly such another head to be found in England. For a Madonna, a Beatrice, a Daydream, or a Donna della Finestra . . . a different head might have been equally appropriate in essence, and, to some eyes and from some points of view, even more appropriate: but, as apprehended and treated by Rossetti, both the mould of face and the expression educed from it seem to be ‘in choral consonancy’ with the personages, and to leave nothing at which a reasonable mind can cavil. (vol. 1, 1895: 245)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 113

18/03/2013 15:50

114

Jane Morris

To his brother, Gabriel’s canvases seemed the key to all mythologies concerning Jane Morris, reconciling the androgynous or unconventional aspects of her appearance into a coherent identity in which model and character merged. For some contemporaries, however, this ‘astonishing countenance’ had a far more limited range than William Michael Rossetti observed: Jane Morris was also strongly associated with the ‘melancholy madness’ characteristic of Rossetti’s later work (Hannay 1883: 133). Writing to his daughter in 1885, for example, George du Maurier described a dinner at which he ‘was depressed by Mrs Morris, Rossetti’s famous model sitting opposite in an old Florentine costume and her old Florentine face above it’ (qtd in Doughty 1949: 372). Later, Helen Rossetti Angeli maintained the connection between art and life by asserting that Jane Morris’s character could be read from her face, whether in Rossetti’s paintings or in photographs: ‘hers was not a happy face, nor it is to be inferred, a happy life’ (1949: 210). In Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies, Angeli juxtaposed this assertion with one of Parsons’s 1865 photographs of Jane Morris on the facing page in which Jane’s pose (downcast head, melancholy eyes) seems to exemplify her melancholy nature (Fig. 1). Commissioned by Rossetti and primarily professional in purpose, however, these photographs attest to a collaborative creative process between artist, model and photographer to achieve a specific aesthetic goal and cannot be read simply as a transparent documentation of the model’s interiority. Whether in these photographs or his canvases, Jane’s depiction as a sad or tragic woman was refracted through the characters in which Rossetti portrayed her. In particular, his representations of Jane as a mistreated wife confined against her will – such as Pia or Proserpine – situated her within a narrative that explained her misery as due to a neglectful or otherwise abusive husband, a representation that contrasted such abuse with the perspective of the artist (whose own powerlessness – to intervene, to rescue – was thus displaced into sympathetic observation). Given the powerful link between Rossetti’s art and the tragic Jane Morris, it is not surprising that Blunt – who seems always to have seen Jane through the lens of Rossetti – should have perpetuated this view of Jane in an acrostic he wrote for her: Jacinths and jessamines and jonquils sweet, All odorous pale flowers from orient lands, (No vain red roses) strew I at thy feet, Emblems of grief and thee, with reverent hands. Mine is no madrigal of passionate joy Or orison or aught less chaste than tears.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 114

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

Figure 1

115

Jane Morris, photographed by John Parsons, 1865 (DGRC).

Ruth on thy brow sits fairest. Its annoy Rends not thy beauty’s raiment, nor the years. In thy shut lips, what secrets! Who am I Should seek a sign at that sad sanctuary? (FM, Diaries, 9 June 1893: 34)

Blunt’s conventional imagery reiterates the key traits of the myth of Jane Morris – sadness, silence, mystery – with a connotation of exoticism.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 115

18/03/2013 15:50

116

Jane Morris

Written in 1893 well after the peak of their affair (although the ‘first line I ever wrote to her’), Blunt admitted that the verse was based on the ‘impression I first had of her ten years ago’, implying his image of Jane was as fixed as any Rossetti portrait (FM, Diaries, 9 June 1893: 34). Jane Morris’s response to this rather muted tribute, however, suggests her lack of identification with her mythic portrayal. Blunt records: ‘I had sent her this, and she asked me today whether her face really gave me the impression of being sad, as she had never thought of it as such’ (FM, Diaries, 9 June 1893: 34). The gap between the myth and the lived experience of the mythologised woman is here made poignantly apparent. While Jane Morris seems to have taken a degree of shared pride in Rossetti’s depictions – as creative collaborations in which her role as model was to convey specific female characters – Blunt’s poem attributes these characteristics to her as innate, as artless, a mis-recognition both of her character and her aesthetic labour as a model with which she took issue. As Blunt’s poetic depiction – with its archaic phrasing and vocabulary – makes clear, the tableau of the suffering woman also fixes Jane Morris in an imaginary past. What was at stake, then, in these representations of Jane Morris as more medieval or mythic than modern? The attribution of queenly qualities to her firstly resonated with the medieval revival that gave figures such as Guinevere and Iseult a renewed prominence in Victorian culture as ambivalent images of beauty, romance or infidelity.1 Framed by narratives of ultimately powerless – if regal – women denied the agency of escape or rebellion, the ‘medieval’ Jane Morris was thus entrenched as a tragic figure. The indissoluble association between the woman and her artistic representations served both to perpetuate a narrative of doom and suffering and also to anachronise her, rendering her helplessly alienated from her own contemporary context. As Esther Meynell expressed it in her biography of William Morris: ‘She was so strangely beautiful, though with a melancholy cast of countenance, that she might have walked out of Malory straight into Morris’s arms’ (1947: 54). In a similar vein, the poet Ernest Rhys recalled seeing Jane in the audience of a performance of Morris’s The Tables Turned (in which Morris appeared in the role of the Archbishop of Canterbury!): before the curtain went up, I had the sensation of seeing a figure, which might have stepped straight out of a Pre-Raphaelite picture, passing through the audience. It was Mrs Morris, whose superb tall form, long neck, and austere, handsome, pale features looked more queenly than any Guinevere or Cleopatra. (1931: 51)

Despite such relentless attempts to anchor Jane Morris in a romanticised past or an unearthly domain, however, it was her very dis-location

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 116

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

117

– the result of her social mobility, her rise from poverty and obscurity to affluence and a certain kind of fame – that demonstrated the extent to which her life was subjected to the forces of Victorian modernity. The population drift from country to city that had brought her family to Oxford, the spread of literacy that gave Jane educational opportunities and aspirations beyond her family of origin, the nascent avant-garde subcultures through which she met Rossetti and Morris, and the rise of new visual technologies such as photography by which her image was increasingly circulated, all marked her out precisely as a woman of her time. In this chapter, I want to consider the paradox by which Jane Morris’s iconic status signaled her position outside the ordinary, as belonging to another time and place altogether, and also marked her as an emergent modern celebrity, a famous face circulating in both high art and print culture, featuring in autotypes and caricatures as well as artistic canvases. I will explore examples of the various strategies by which Jane Morris was represented as an iconic wonder: as ethnic other, living tableau, uncanny figure from another time, or some concatenation of all of these. In the second part of the chapter, I argue that Jane Morris was not tragically trapped within such depictions but enacted a form of aesthetic self-formation, more typically associated with male figures of the period, such as Whistler and Wilde, who forged an identity melding celebrity with creative agency centred on an artistic presentation of self. Through a re-consideration of her distinctive dress style, her role as an artist’s model, and her conscious negotiation of her iconic status, I will show that Jane Morris’s life narrative becomes recognisable as that of a quintessentially modern subject: socially-mobile, creatively engaging with identity formation in both the public and private domains. The aim is not to claim for Jane Morris a kind of heroic triumph over her social conditions but to suggest that stories of a woman ‘out of time’ may register a sense of displacement imposed by her cultural location that constrained the extent to which aesthetic self-formation was possible for a woman like Jane Morris.

Wonder: ‘She haunts me still’ Stephen Greenblatt has described how wonder – the power ‘to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention’ – operates as a strategy in textual accounts of the exotic where, paradoxically, the object of wonder is described in terms of already-known categories or forms of knowledge (1991: 42).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 117

18/03/2013 15:50

118

Jane Morris

As Claire Colebrook glosses it, for Greenblatt wonder is both ‘part of an economy of encounters and responses’ and a ‘colonising strategy’ that attempts to contain radical difference by decontextualising the apparent strangeness of the phenomenon in order to render it explicable through narrative description (Colebrook 1997: 214). Wonder, then, registers the limits of a culture’s available forms of representation even as it textualises – and hence domesticates – the radical difference that had evoked the sense of wonder in the first place.2 We can see a similar strategy at work in some accounts of Jane Morris by her contemporaries where, in seeking to record an exceptional encounter, they are only able to employ existing categories or tropes to describe the otherwise indescribable. Henry James’s famous first encounter, already referred to earlier in this study, can be seen in this context as one example of this strategy: calling Jane Morris literally ‘a wonder’ who ‘haunts me still’, James’s tone of gothic mockery in his letter to his sister undercut what might otherwise have been an unsettling experience (Lubbock 1920: 17–18). Adopting a more respectful tone, H. Buxton Forman, author of The Books of William Morris, invoked a universal paradigm of feminine beauty in order to convey the wonder of Jane Morris: It was in 1869 that I first beheld Mrs Morris at 26, Queen Square, a vision seen through a doorway, standing, . . . and when I last saw her at Kelmscott House, seated at a table, her hair almost white and still very beautiful, there was the same unconscious mediaeval grace and majesty of carriage. I have seen beautiful women in all quarters of the globe, but never one so strangely lovely and majestic as Mrs Morris. (1914: 203)

Even those less romantically inclined, like Bruce Glasier who encountered Jane Morris through socialist campaigning with her husband, framed their impressions of her unearthly appearance through Rossetti’s mythologising to convey her exceptionality: ‘She looked a veritable Astarte – a being, as I thought, who did not quite belong to our common mortal mould’ (1921: 45).3 In Forman and Glasier’s accounts, Jane Morris was a vision almost removed from the processes of history altogether: like Rossetti’s canvases, she did not alter over time or, at least, continued to bear an uncanny palimpsestic relation to her representations. For Angela Thirkell (granddaughter of Georgiana Burne-Jones) too, the woman she called ‘Aunt Janey’ was a distant figure, set apart from the mundane: ‘The large deep-set eyes, the full lips, the curved throat, the overshadowing hair, were all there. Even in her old age, she looked like a queen as she moved about the house in long white draperies, her hands in a white muff, crowned by her glorious hair’ (1931: 23). Perhaps the best account of Jane Morris as an unearthly wonder

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 118

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

119

was by Richard Le Gallienne who described in his memoirs a visit to Kelmscott Manor in the late 1890s: The temptation to look upon the face of Jane Burden, whose strange loveliness dreams out at us from the paintings of Rossetti, the very muse of the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, was too great to be resisted, and presently I was seated with her, tall and stately and lovelier perhaps for a touch of the years on her splendid hair, taking tea at the foot of the old sunny orchard, where, I said to myself, Rossetti too, had once sat and painted her on just such an afternoon. I remember that we had some particularly good quince jam with our tea, and, on my remarking upon its goodness, ‘I made it myself,’ said the Blessed Damozel, ‘and, as you like it so much, you shall have a jar to take with you.’ A jar of quince jam made by the beautiful lady whom Morris had loved and Rossetti had painted! It was like receiving it at the hands of Helen of Troy . . . It was a dream-like afternoon, and, as I departed with my quince jam, it seemed to me that it must indeed have come to me in a dream. Perhaps it vanished back into dreamland, for it cannot be conceived that it was eaten in commonplace fashion, like other earthly jams. (1925: 125–7)

As an original member of the Rhymers’ Club (a group of poets first brought together by W. B. Yeats and Ernest Rhys in 1890), Le Gallienne moved in metropolitan literary and artistic circles in which ‘the beautiful lady whom Morris had loved and Rossetti had painted’ was known (and his reference to Helen of Troy clearly hints at some degree of awareness of the romantic rivalry between husband and artist). The inclusion of this Kelmscott visit in his account of the 1890s further suggests the status of Jane Morris as an emblematic figure of the fin de siècle and underlines the memoirist’s status as a privileged insider in such aesthetic networks. In the rather laboured joke about the unearthly jam, however, Le Gallienne distinguishes between artist and muse: Jane Morris was a product not a producer. Her creative labour mystified as ‘dreaming’, her agency was thus doubly effaced through a masculine perspective that recognised the value neither of women’s domestic nor creative work. To other contemporary observers, Jane Morris was more exotic than ethereal, although equally out of place in mundane settings. Letitia Scott (wife of William Bell Scott), for instance, observed after her first meeting with Jane: ‘I can’t think what countrywoman Mrs Morris is like, not an Englishwoman certainly . . . All we little women looked quite diminutive beside Mrs Morris’ (qtd in Scott, vol. 2, 1892: 60). William Michael Rossetti reiterated Letitia Scott’s insistence on Jane Morris’s ‘un-English’ appearance, albeit in a more consciously aestheticised mode: ‘Her face was at once tragic, mystic, passionate, calm, beautiful, and gracious – a face for a sculptor, and a face for a painter – a face solitary in England, and not all like that of an Englishwoman, but rather of an Ionian Greek’ (vol. 1, 1895: 199). Where Letitia Scott

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 119

18/03/2013 15:50

120

Jane Morris

struggled to name an appropriate comparison and could only resort to an emphatic negative classification (‘not an Englishwoman certainly’), William Michael Rossetti invoked a suitably-classicised foreignness to explain Jane Morris’s alterity (‘Ionian Greek’). The persistent emphasis on her physical distinctiveness explained in terms of ethnic difference, however, may be another way in which class was disavowed as a frame of reference. Jane Morris’s rustic origins, that is, were transposed into corporeal characteristics – her dark colouring, physical stature, luxuriant hair, prominent features (Fig. 2) – that powerfully reminded observers of her uncanny otherness. Wilfrid Blunt, however, exoticised Jane Morris by positing her affinity with Mediterranean peasants, thus tangentially introducing the category of class as well as ethnicity to convey her outsider status: She is more like a Spanish or Italian, than an Englishwoman, in character; that is to say, she is kind hearted, physically passionate, but not a sentimental woman. She has an outside garment of romance, from having constantly lived with romantic people, & a certain outside knowledge of art, from having lived with artists. But none of this is natural to her, & she is essentially domestic & in its better sense common-place. (FM Diaries, 18 January 1886)

For Blunt, Jane has only acquired a veneer of sophistication through proximity with the civilised but it was not her natural demeanor or domain. Her strangeness becomes a natural attribute, neither a sign of skill nor artistry, and subtly implies an inferior status without directly addressing class as a significant aspect of identity at all. A similar strategy was evident in British cultural representations of ‘Gypsy-ness’ in the nineteenth century, signifying an ambiguously domestic exoticism, as Deborah Epstein Nord has argued (2006: 10). Like the apparently-observable differences associated with class, Nord suggests, representations of racial or cultural difference relating to gypsy identity were ‘haunted’ by the impossibility of drawing neat, impermeable distinctions between self and other (2006: 12). Indeed, in twentiethcentury biographies of Rossetti, ‘Gypsy-ness’ was explicitly raised in relation to Jane Morris’s ethnicity as a troubling issue that could not be easily resolved. Angeli, for instance, asserted that: To those who knew her only in effigy, as to many who knew her personally, there is something inscrutable about Jane Morris. Her beauty, which does not appeal to everybody, is almost overpowering. Rossetti’s drawings and paintings of her are faithful portraiture. He did not and could not exaggerate her beauty, nor hardly emphasize its sombre depths. It has been said that she could not be pure English, that she must have had gipsy blood, and that her maiden name, Burden, pointed to this. She was, on the contrary, of pure English stock, and pure Oxfordshire – Cotswolds. (1949: 211)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 120

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

Figure 2

121

Jane Morris, photographed by John Parsons, 1865 (DGRC).

While the repetition of the word ‘pure’ seeks to assert Jane’s origins as irrefutably English, the effect is rather the opposite. Writing after Angeli, Rosalie Glynn Grylls also ambiguously kept open the question of Jane’s ethnicity: Jane ‘seemed to come from a different race – a throw-back to some ancient British stock in the Cotswolds . . . the gypsy of the Cotswolds’ (1964a: 68). The apparent contradiction within these two statements around the attribution of gypsy identity and its connotations leaves undetermined the ‘problem’ of Jane Morris’s exotic exceptionality.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 121

18/03/2013 15:50

122

Jane Morris

Perhaps the most bizarre rendering of Jane Morris as exotic, however, was the anecdote of Rossetti’s zebu – a small Brahmin bull – that he was said to have purchased in 1864 ‘because it had eyes like Janey Morris’ (Pedrick 1964: 89).4 Purchased from Cremorne Gardens where it had formed part of the spectacle of the ‘beast-show’ (W. M. Rossetti vol. 1, 1895: 254), the zebu one day rebelled against its captivity and, breaking free from its chain, chased Rossetti round the garden, leading to its swift removal from Cheyne Walk.5 Attributed to the actress Ellen Terry, the joke about the zebu with Jane Morris’s eyes relies on a link between the exoticism of the natural world, especially nature from beyond Britain, and the disturbing allure that Jane Morris was believed to have personified, positioning Jane as always-already outside the domestic frame. Like the zebu – a ‘beautiful animal’ according to William Michael Rossetti (vol. 1, 1895: 254) – Jane Morris was often interpreted through an aesthetic of the exotic, as either a wonder or a joke (or possibly both at the same time) that captivated the viewer’s attention and defied normal categories of experience. The repetition of this zebu story as an instance of Rossettian eccentricity (notably in Horner and Whistler’s accounts), reminds us that one of the purposes of the biographical anecdote was to reinforce cultural types and already-known cultural truths (Codell 2003: 206): in this case, about the nature of romantic obsession (which easily descends into farce, especially at the hands of Whistler6) and about the ‘un-tamed’ exotic, that thwarts the desire to possess or contain it. Also like the zebu – given discrepant names and physical characteristics in the various, unverified, accounts and ultimately reduced to a cliché, a ‘bull in a china shop’ (Knight 1887: 95) – Jane Morris was often generalised as a stereotype in accounts by Victorian contemporaries. The imputation of exoticism, then, which potentially threatened to confound the coherence of categories based on race, class or gender, was an attempt to explain or domesticate a ‘wonder’ who, it is worth recalling, was also sometimes referred to as ‘Moocow’ by Rossetti.7 One contemporary account that attempted to reconcile the uncanny and the domestic in his recollection of Jane Morris was that by Graham Robertson who, quibbling with a correspondent’s critical depiction, insisted on the evidence of his ‘personal acquaintance with her’ as endorsed by May Morris: ‘tragic’ (apart from personal appearance) does not describe Mrs Morris at all. In fact I have always thought that one of the chief reasons for the great sympathy and attraction which she and Rossetti had for each other was their mutual sense of humour. As May Morris said to me in our long talk in the attics at Kelmscott, ‘You always knew that Mother loved fun.’ And I believe that I was one of the very few people to penetrate that secret in the after years

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 122

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

123

when she had resigned herself to being regarded as Venus Astarte, ‘betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.’ She wasn’t in the least mysterious and must, I am sure, always have struck anyone who knew her with the slightest degree of intimacy as an essentially good woman. (Preston 1953: 461–2)8

Robertson’s account is a good example of what Tom Mole has described as ‘the hermeneutic of intimacy’ operating in narratives of celebrities, in which discriminating readers or observers can ‘distinguish their understanding of a celebrity from that of those around them’ (2007: 25). Such observers claimed a ‘truth’ behind the myth which remained impermeable to less intimate onlookers, at the same time as they demonstrated their cultural capital through their awareness of the frames of reference or allusions through which Jane Morris is usually understood – from the Blessed Damozel to Venus Astarte. The hermeneutic of intimacy in celebrity accounts, Mole contends, ‘require[s] subjectivity to be understood as structured around a private interior . . . hidden from the view of the undiscerning’ (2007: 25). The ‘secret’ of Jane Morris according to Robertson, however, was the rather mundane truth that she was simply a ‘good’ domestic woman, echoing Blunt’s evaluation of her simple peasant nature. Robertson’s account, then, no more reveals the ‘true’ nature of the mythic icon than any other observation but rather demonstrates another instance where an acquaintance’s interpretation of Jane Morris was intended to foreground their own insider’s status: it tells us something about him, not about her. Despite his insistence she was not a ‘tragic’ figure, however, Robertson’s claim that Jane had ‘resigned herself to being regarded’ as an unearthly representation and thus a mystery to mere mortals suggests a level of self-awareness of her mythic status that raises more questions than it dispels. Such resignation would imply a powerlessness to challenge the representation that seems to bring us back to the woman trapped in her own myth but, as the following section will explore, there is evidence of a degree of agency in Jane Morris’s self-presentation that complicates the depiction of this Victorian icon and prefigures more recent understandings of celebrity formation.

Celebrity: The Style of ‘the famous Mrs. Morris’ The iconic status Jane Morris acquired during her lifetime constituted a form of celebrity that is difficult to re-construct in our own era of instant fame. Long before paparazzi culture or YouTube, Jane Morris’s mediated image was circulated through diverse modes with varying degrees of public-ness: published reviews of Rossetti’s art; word-of-mouth

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 123

18/03/2013 15:50

124

Jane Morris

reports among London’s artistic and literary coteries; autotype reproductions authorised by Rossetti (Marsh 1999: 503); and, later, reproductions of canvases in magazines such as Black and White.9 Although, after Rossetti’s death in 1882, his art works were more widely exhibited than they had ever been during his lifetime, it is worth remembering that as early as 1871 one aspect of the ‘fleshly school’ that Buchanan had attacked was its penchant for self-promotion.10 Buchanan’s charge had been two-fold: that the marketing of identities was moving art and literature from the domain of a properly-informed cognoscenti to an illinformed mass audience; and that these commodified artistic identities were accruing fame based on notoriety rather than artistic achievement – what Tuite (2007) has called ‘scandalous celebrity’.11 In his book on Rossetti published in 1882, William Tirebuck described this strange phenomenon of Rossetti’s scandalous celebrity in which a complex network of personal gossip, journalism and fashion accrued around the artist in what we would now recognise as a form of celebrity ‘branding’: For whatever reason Rossetti did not exhibit his pictures, the very fact that he did not, and that he held himself aloof from Society, provoked the interest of wonderment. People most like to see that from which they are most prohibited, and mystery only intensifies the desire . . . It is said that the missing part of a newspaper will concern a woman more than any other part, and so the unexhibited pictures of a (to them) mysteriously retiring artist have come to concern those who seek the paragraph chit-chat of journals, and so help to blow that bubble of people’s lips called ‘fame’. . . . He also happened in time to have, as a result of his greatness, an inner circle of worshipping and influential friends who could at odd moments whet the public appetite for some unforthcoming work of their caged genius. He likewise had an outer circle of admirers who spoke of him and his work in superlatives, or pantomimed inexpressibles of admiration . . . Tales were told (as tales are told) of him and his seclusive personality, and even the name of royalty was embroidered about the border of his eccentricity. True or untrue, these winkings and noddings, these outside sputterings sputtered by ungreat people to assume greatness; these buzzings of flies about the eyelashes of the basking cow, became belief, and therefore became a hypothetical Rossetti if not the real one. Thus there grew about Rossetti’s name the halo of mystery. . . . His pictures were not only purchased and made household specialities of, but ladies have wrought his singular circular initials into the centre of antimacassars, and other similar things . . . A man who could excite this practical kind of admiration was assuredly not of the commonplace order, and this antimacassar ritual of worship indicates to those who are outside either the inner or outer circles, the actuality of his permeating influence. (1882: 29–33, original emphasis)

Tirebuck’s depiction of concentric circles of friends and associates gives a sense of the widening frame around Rossetti, the complicity of the artist and those closest to him in spreading his fame through associating

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 124

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

125

his name with mystery, eccentricity and genius. This account also demonstrates the increasing imbrication between high art and mass culture, through the commodification of Rossetti’s name as well as the press coverage of his work. Through her conspicuous presence in his art, Jane Morris was thus ambiguously implicated in the publicity surrounding Rossetti, endowing her, in turn, with a form of celebrity.12 Jane Morris embodied the capacity of celebrities to be ‘vectors of emotional identification’ (Goldsmith 2009: 22) who could provoke widely divergent responses, dividing as much as uniting opinion but leaving few unmoved (Mole 2009: 8). Her name was omitted from most of the early books and articles on Rossetti following his death and yet, especially in the articles critical of Rossetti’s achievements, veiled references to the ‘one face’ – an allusion, as well, to Christina Rossetti’s ‘In an Artist’s Studio’ – that dominated his later work invoked Jane Morris in terms that insiders would have understood. Like Rossetti’s pictures, she was famous for not being seen and all the more sought-after for that reason. Where, however, was Jane Morris seen? People who themselves had a public profile or a mutual acquaintance and who desired to meet Jane Morris (or her husband) could come to her home to do so (as was the case, for instance, with Henry James, Vernon Lee and Richard Le Gallienne), according to the conventions of morning visits. She could also be observed at galleries like the Grosvenor or the Royal Academy,13 or at a range of semi-public, semi-private events, such as dinners, evening parties and other gatherings in the homes of London’s salon culture, demonstrating that the public and private spheres were in reality much more permeable in Victorian culture than often suggested. Coterie or salon culture provided important opportunities for the sighting of Victorian celebrities. Social hostesses, for instance, sought the presence of authors (‘literary lions’) at events where the attraction was ‘less the chance to talk to the lion, than the chance to look at him’ (Mole 2009: 6, original emphasis) and, indeed, Victorian anecdotes described just such encounters where Rossetti as ‘lion’ was observed in the company of Jane Morris: at his side, she is a spectacle rather than an interlocutor, seen but not heard.14 Whistler, for example, described a reception where he saw, ‘in an inner room, Rossetti and Mrs Morris sitting side by side in state, being worshipped’ (Pennell and Pennell 1920: 84). Such events were the forerunner of the modernist metropolitan salons described by Janet Lyon as a form of ‘living theatre, a collaborative and palimpsestic space for the display of evolving metropolitan style through eccentric costume and experimental performance, artistic interior design . . . and other vague but unmistakable signifying practices of cultural vanguardism’

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 125

18/03/2013 15:50

126

Jane Morris

(2009: 690). Taken out of this salon-like context, accounts of these encounters seem to support the interpretation of Jane Morris as aloof on the one hand or unworldly on the other, graciously bestowing her presence or moodily trading on her artistic image, interpretations that fail to acknowledge the semi-public nature of such events where performance and style were subject to a wide range of interpretations – and intentions – by hosts and guests alike. Rossetti, no less than Jane Morris, that is, was playing a social role – as ‘artist’ or ‘lion’ – that cannot simply be read as inauthentic in the context of vanguard aesthetic culture. The power of Rossetti’s art in shaping observers’ impressions of Jane Morris in these encounters means that depictions of Jane Morris are often the textual equivalent of photographic stills, freezing a moment in time in which observer and observed seem trapped for perpetuity. In such narratives, Jane Morris is a woman caught within the artist’s frame, almost an ‘invention’ of Rossetti’s, passively succumbing to her own mythic status. Blurring the role of artist’s model (as a professional undertaking) and muse (as passive source of inspiration), such depictions of Jane Morris deny her both authenticity and agency but, as Kathy Psomiades has stated (in a rather Wildean turn of phrase), ‘If aestheticism teaches us anything at all, it is that there is nothing remotely “natural” about the image of a pretty girl’ (1997: 22): Jane Morris’s iconic presence needs to be understood within the broader cultural context of Aestheticism. Recent scholarship on aesthetic selfpresentation in the fin-de-siècle period has centred on male artists and writers such as Wilde and Whistler who ‘infused fashion with serious artistic and historical interests’ and ‘made a space in the cultural consciousness for a new form of identity’ (Schaffer 2000: 46, 52). At a time when the cycles of fashion and fame endemic to consumer culture were beginning to transform the public sphere, aesthetic self-fashioning was more accommodating to privileged forms of masculine subjectivity where the role of artist could be embodied through distinctive modes of dress, demeanour and representation. For a woman seeking to perform ‘creative subject as spectacle’, the process was fraught with contradiction. I want to suggest, however, that some of the insights from scholarship devoted to the self-fashioning of masculine identity in the period of Aestheticism may be productively turned to Jane Morris. Even though her celebrity status was not visible through the kinds of public performances in which Wilde and Whistler were displayed (lectures, interviews, trials, for instance), she had a currency in popular culture beyond the networks of personal acquaintance and, through caricature in image and text, she was recognised and recognisable by a wider public than would ever have seen a Rossetti canvas. The dissemination

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 126

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

127

of Aestheticism through popular culture saw Jane Morris commodified as the recognisable face of the movement, most notably through George du Maurier’s Punch cartoons in which her distinctive features were mockingly depicted (a point to which I will return), but her correspondence reveals a conscious awareness and negotiation of her status as an aesthetic object. Feminist critiques of Pre-Raphaelite art in the 1970s and 1980s protested the powerlessness of Pre-Raphaelite models subjected to the male artistic gaze (Cherry and Pollock 1984; Marsh 1985). My contention, however, is that not only was Jane Morris aware of, and accepted, a certain level of celebrity due to her prominent place in Rossetti’s art but that we understand her artistic modelling within a wider sense of her identity formation which combined public and private dimensions, expressed through the inter-relation between personal style and her artistic image. In a letter written to Blunt from Italy in early 1885, Jane Morris conveyed a sense of her emerging status as a cultural icon whose reputation had spread beyond Britain: I must tell you a story of a funny American who came to lunch with us the other day – directly after the meal he pulled out his watch and said “There is something in the town I must see; I have just half an hour to spare,” so he rushed off, and returned to the minute. “Well!” he said, “I came over from Mentone to see three things, I have seen two of them and am going to see the third, I am quite happy now.” We knew that Mr Macdonald [George Macdonald, the novelist] was one of the three but were mystified as to the other two, so we asked what they were, when he answered, “Mrs Morris, and Garnier’s house.” Villa Garnier I must tell you is a hideous construction by the same man who built the Paris Opera House, I am told there are some good paintings inside by Mésonnier [sic], but the American had not taken the trouble to go inside, only to gaze on the outside walls and chimney:pots. I was not much flattered, but immensely amused. (Faulkner 1986: 7)

This anecdote attests to the degree of celebrity Jane had acquired through the international spread of Pre-Raphaelitism. The fame and reputation of Rossetti’s work had increased markedly in Italy following his death in 1882 (Pieri 2007: 40) but Jane’s previous visit to Italy in 1881 had also brought her into contact with an expatriate community of artists and writers, including Vernon Lee and Marie Spartali Stillman who, each in her own way, was influential in the spread of PreRaphaelite ideas in Italy.15 While the identity of the ‘funny American’ is not known, American interest in Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites had been growing since Charles Eliot Norton began collecting and promoting Pre-Raphaelite art in the 1850s (see Casteras 1990).16 Jane Morris’s return to Italy in 1885, then, occurred at a time when the cognoscenti of art and literature were becoming increasingly familiar with Rossetti’s

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 127

18/03/2013 15:50

128

Jane Morris

work and the ‘face’ of Pre-Raphaelite beauty, resulting in this humorous encounter. Jane’s concluding remark – ‘I was not much flattered, but immensely amused’ – is a telling insight into her self-awareness of the ‘monumental’ status she had acquired and the limitations of such adoration as a rather superficial interest, with no regard for the hidden depths of the iconic woman. The self-deprecating amusement evident in this letter raises the question of the extent to which Jane Morris was complicit in her aestheticisation and her status as Rossetti’s muse. The use of lovers as models, Prettejohn has argued, has been given undue emphasis even in scholarly literature on the Pre-Raphaelites, obscuring the radical intentions of the artists in refusing to subordinate the model’s distinctive features to the overall composition or subject (2006: 26–7). The ‘model as doppelganger’ orthodoxy not only reduces the Pre-Raphaelite project to romantic obsession or youthful folly but prevents adequate acknowledgement of the collaborative labour of the model in the production of art. Jane Morris’s modelling was neither simply a form of seduction nor a Trilby-esque surrender to the creative force of the male artist but a shared endeavour which she continued to affirm after Rossetti’s death through maintaining a keen interest in his posthumous reputation and the competing interpretations of his work. In a spirited letter written to Theodore Watts-Dunton, for instance, Jane Morris defended Rossetti’s aims and achievements in a way that implicitly assumed her right to interpret his work and career. Written in pencil, usually an indication that she was in ill-health and unable to sit upright to write with an inkpen, this letter nonetheless adopts an authoritative tone in evaluating recent review articles and books on Rossetti’s work: My dear Mr Watts So many thanks for sending reviews, I suppose one must regard them as praising the works, but how they would have enraged the painter himself. Fancy his hearing it said that his finest work was done about 1866! He would have gone raving mad on the spot, even though it had been but a remark of the pink pig’s (Quilter) the swinish tastes of the said creature are not to be wondered at, but it is a little surprise to me that Colvin and one or two others of the more decent art-critics should have taken something the same view of the works painted about that time. I agree heartily with those who consider the early work the best, but I think the same might be said of most men’s works; there is a freshness an interest in everything, a wealth of invention that is seldom seen except in the productions of the few first years of manhood, and all this without questioning the sanity of a man. That Gabriel was mad was but too true, no one know that better than myself but that his work after 1868 was worthless (as Gosse has the impudence to assert) I deny.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 128

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

129

I don’t know why I am writing all this to you, but I feel that I want to talk to some one about him, I am not likely to be in Town for a very long time to have any actual talk with you . . . I have seen neither of the books, I imagine from all I hear that Sharp’s [1882] must be ludicrous. I am rather curious to see Caine’s [1882], if you have it by you, and could send it me without trouble, I should be much obliged . . . Always yours sincerely Jane Morris (BL, Add 45353; original emphasis)

The ‘swinish tastes’ of Quilter, the ‘impudence’ of Gosse, as distinct from the ‘more decent art-critics’: these are not the comments of a woman insecure in her ability to adjudicate the critical reception of Rossetti’s art. The letter speaks with equal frankness about Rossetti’s state of mind which, in some articles after Rossetti’s death, was offered as an explanation for a perceived diminution in his art in the latter part of her life. The letter is not, however, simply an expression of partisan loyalty: she does not dispute the strength and originality of Rossetti’s early work but refuses a simplistic narrative of creative deterioration that some art critics were depicting. One particularly negative evaluation of Rossetti’s work by David Hannay in the National Review may be the article that was the immediate inspiration for Jane’s letter. Hannay’s condemnation of Rossetti’s later work was associated with the dominance of Jane Morris’s image in this work. Harry Quilter, too, asserting that Rossetti’s ‘best period’ was ‘from 1850 to 1870’, linked Rossetti’s artistic decline, his chloral addiction, and his obsession (after ‘having suffered the great loss of his wife’) with ‘one woman’s face’ whose ‘strange beauty . . . he has made so familiar to us’ (1883: 198). Having praised at length the achievement of Beata Beatrix and explained that work in relation to the death of Siddall, Quilter then recounted Rossetti’s deterioration in terms that aligned it closely with the influence of Jane Morris: In some of his works, especially in his later ones, when the fatal influence of choral was beginning to wither his powers, there are distortions and even uglinesses such as can scarcely be condoned, and it is impossible to help regretting that, throughout a great part of his life, the influence of one woman’s face should have been so great as to appear in all his chief characters – now as Proserpine, now as the Virgin Mary, and so throughout the range of his poetical fancies and the old legends with which he occupied his pencil . . . There is probably no record of a painter whose personality grew to be so submerged in the form and face of one woman as did that of him of whom we are writing. It is scarcely too much to say that for the last twenty-five years of his life everything he wrote and painted could be traced to her in one way or another. (1883: 196, 198, emphasis added)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 129

18/03/2013 15:50

130

Jane Morris

Like Quilter, Hannay’s article emphasised the ‘monotony’ of Rossetti’s work and attributed it to the same cause: ‘the same face, the same stare, nearly the same attitude, on every wall’ (1883: 128).17 Even WattsDunton’s essay in The Nineteenth Century, which sought both to disclose ‘The Truth About Rossetti’ and defend his persistent interest in the same (inter-linked) themes – woman, mystery, sadness – agreed on the singular focus of his later work as the product of the artist’s obsession with one particular model (by implication in the context of discussing Proserpine, Jane Morris) (1883: 418). Was Jane Morris’s spirited defence and sustained commitment to the value and importance of Rossetti’s art attributable to personal vanity, a desire to ensure her own artistic immortality through close association with Rossetti’s legacy? Such an explanation would align with enduring cultural associations between feminine beauty and narcissism but should perhaps be resisted on these grounds: the ‘obvious’ explanation is all too often the most ideologically motivated, after all. In correspondence between Jane and Gabriel concerning sittings, where poses, costumes and other props are discussed, a picture emerges of a professional collaboration between artist and model involving the embodied skills and aesthetic sensibilities that each brings to bear on the project. Correspondence concerning the blue silk dress immortalised in Rossetti’s painting of 1868, for instance, provides insight into this creative dialogue between the two. Jane seems to have made and embroidered the dress for the portrait Mrs William Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) now hanging at Kelmscott Manor. In early May 1868, Rossetti wrote to her: About the blue silk dress it occurs to me to say that I think the sleeves should be as full at the top as is consistent with simplicity of outline, and perhaps would gain by being lined with some soft material, but of this you will be the best judge. The pieces of gold embroidery in front might (if you have time to make it) be something like this, [sketch of pattern] unless as is very possible a better idea strikes you. However it is a great pity that the last portrait (which I fancy is the one you will choose) is in such a position that both this and the embroidery which you propose to put at the back will be hidden. In the other front view portrait these will show to great advantage. (Bryson 1976: 3)

The dress described corresponds with that which appears in the painting and also resembles the dress in which Jane was photographed by Parsons in Rossetti’s garden in 1865, suggesting that this was a design favoured by Jane and perhaps made in similar versions over a period of years: Rossetti’s deferral to Jane as ‘the better judge’ may stem from his knowledge of her experience in this design. The difficulty of disentangling Rossetti’s motives in this letter – professional attention to detail conveyed in matter-of-fact terms, combined with flattery of the object

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 130

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

131

of desire to be depicted and solicitude that her efforts not be wasted – should not preclude attention to the similarly complex amalgam of feelings, motives and practices on the part of the letter’s recipient. The process of modelling, like the outcome of this process in the finished painting, was over-determined, combining feelings derived from the relationship between artist and model and the forms of emotional investment in a shared aesthetic project. Such complex feelings should not disqualify the attribution of agency to Jane, just as the passions of Rossetti do not discount the achievement in his art. Bullen, however, in recounting the blue silk dress sittings concludes that ‘In a very real sense, Rossetti was “creating” Jane Morris’, reading the scenario as one in which creative agency rested entirely with the artist (2011: 200). Given Rossetti’s observation that the gold embroidery would not be visible in the proposed portrait, why would Jane have undertaken such painstaking decoration of the garment? It suggests more may be at stake than a costume for a sitting. The investment of time, skill and creativity that such embellishment would require constitutes the maker of the blue silk dress as an aesthetic labourer, just like the maker of The Blue Silk Dress. In the photographic record of Jane Morris, the most common image of her is in a dark silk dress like the one featured in this portrait and described by Henry James (as made of ‘dead purple stuff’). Such textual accounts of the dark silk dress suggest that it was not solely the domain of professional modelling but had a close association with Jane Morris in private life and shows how her personal style both gestured towards, and transcended, the professional work of the studio to constitute a significant aspect of identity formation.18 Cockerell recorded a visit to Kelmscott House in 1892, where ‘Mrs M was dressed in a glorious blue gown, and as she sat on the sofa, she looked like an animated Rossetti picture’ (Cockerell Diaries, BL, Add. 52629: 65). More touchingly, May Morris recalled: The picture [of the Blue Silk Gown] perpetuates a delicious, simple silk gown of shot blue and brown that was a great favourite with the little girls. It had some fragile ornament of gold thread at the throat and wrists, and was of a delicate, faintly-rustling texture, that we never tired of stroking. (vol. III, 1911: xxxv)

The sensory elements May describes – the look, feel and sound of the garment – underline its inextricable association with her mother. Jonathan Shirland, in discussing the development of artists’ dress in this period, has described the precarious discursive positioning attached to such attire, which sought to challenge normative (masculine) dress without being reduced to a derogatory labeling of ‘fancy dress’ with its

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 131

18/03/2013 15:50

132

Jane Morris

implication of harmlessly theatrical, if excessive, ‘dressing up’ (2007: 34 n. 43). Women’s Aesthetic dress, especially the dress of a woman known as an artist’s model, walked an even more precarious line: away from the props and drapes of the studio setting, how could a woman challenge the conventions of feminine fashion without invoking a derision or disapproval that would undermine her social status? References to Jane Morris’s appearance attest that this was indeed a reality, as some observers recorded the shock or amusement they derived from the sight of Jane Morris, singled out from the women around her by her style as well as her stature and, in satirical depictions, female Aesthetic dress was often portrayed as ‘an external symptom of transgressive ideas or behaviour’ (Mitchell 2010: 46). If Jane Morris designed and made dresses for wear in private life as well as artistic modelling, however, she was an exception at this time, placing her in the vanguard of fashion rather than frozen in another time. As Lucy Crane (sister of Walter) wrote in the early 1880s, addressing a middle-class audience in a series of lectures she published, Few women who have work to do in life, their living to make, or families to care for, can take the trouble to set fashion at defiance, and wear a selfdevised costume. The opposition to established rule; the difficulty of getting original ideas satisfactorily carried out; the becoming an object of special remark and comment to one’s friends and the general public – these things seem to hinder such an enterprise, and make one feel that more is lost than gained by the attempt. (1886: 93)

As much as Crane considered fashion reform desirable – in the interests of both aesthetics and comfort – she was pessimistic that women in her audience would embrace the risk and unconventionality of self-made clothing (and hence she could only express the hope for gradual improvement in women’s dress). Jane Morris’s willingness to risk ‘becoming an object of special remark’ and her initiative in carrying ‘original ideas’ to completion aligns her more closely with the kind of sartorial originality associated with artistic men in the fin-de-siècle period. Despite this, Oscar Wilde photographed in knee breeches and silken hose is now more easily read as issuing a radical challenge to conventions of gender, sexuality and class than is Jane Morris in a costume that combined signifiers of past and present and eschewed fashion norms.19 The blue silk dress (and its variants), designed, made and embellished by Jane Morris, in collaboration with Rossetti, thus emerges as vital to the self-fashioning of an aesthetic subject in which we can see symbolised a claim to agency. The model is not simply the passive bearer of the artist’s vision but fashions an identity that transcends the frame of

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 132

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

133

the artist’s interpretation, even though Rossetti’s literal framing of Mrs William Morris attempted to anchor her meaning within the triangular relationship binding the husband, artist and model.20 The Parsons photographs in which Jane wears a similar, if not the same, dress as that in Rossetti’s portrait and as recalled by May Morris, has been described as one of the earliest examples of Aesthetic dress to be seen in photographs (Ford 2004: 311). Whether the 1865 dress was entirely made by Jane or merely modified or embellished by her is impossible to ascertain with certainty21 but these photographs show varied arrangements of the dress (sometimes with the waist accentuated by a contrasting belt, or arranged to maximise fullness) and ornamentation (lace trim at neck and cuffs, or beads). In conjunction with the strongly contrasting poses in which Jane Morris is depicted (standing, seated, reclining, in profile, facing the camera or turned away from it), and her different hair arrangements, these photographs demonstrate the skill and aptitude Jane Morris brought to artistic modelling. Like a professional portfolio, they provide an invaluable record of an aesthetic performance that imbricated art and life – not in the way that Angeli assumed, as proof of the correspondence between Jane’s (melancholy) character and Rossetti’s art, but as self-fashioning through which Jane simultaneously espoused the values of a Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic and literally embodied her own aesthetic labour, in the form of her dress, ornamentation and hair styling.22 In Vernon Lee’s novel Miss Brown, however, Lee depicted her Jane Morris-like heroine’s adoption of Aesthetic dress as a degrading experience that reduced her to a prurient spectacle dressed up in theatrical garb: Miss Brown was by this time tolerably accustomed to the eccentric garb of æsthetic circles, and she firmly believed that it was the only one which a selfrespecting woman might wear; but when she saw the dress which Hamlin had designed for her, she could not help shrinking back in dismay. It was of that Cretan silk, not much thicker than muslin, which is woven in minute wrinkles of palest yellowy white; it was made, it seemed to her, more like a night-gown than anything else, shapeless and yet clinging with large and small folds, and creases like those of damp sculptor’s drapery, or the garments of Mantegna’s women . . . Anne walked to the mirror. She was almost terrified at the figure which met her. That colossal woman, with wrinkled drapery clinging to her in halfantique, half-medieval guise, – that great solemn, theatrical creature, could that be herself? “I think,” she said in despair, “that there’s something very odd about it, Mrs Perkins. It looks somehow all wrong. Are you sure that something hasn’t got unstitched?” “No indeed, madam,” answered the dressmaker, ruffled in her dignity. “I have exactly followed the design; and,” she added, with crushing effect, “as

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 133

18/03/2013 15:50

134

Jane Morris

it’s I who execute the most difficult designs for the Lyceum, I think I may say that it could not be made differently.” The Lyceum! Anne felt half petrified. What! Hamlin was having her rigged out by a stage dressmaker! (1884: 305–8)

When Anne is thus displayed to Hamlin – her patron and would-be suitor – prior to their departure for a social event, he completes the Aesthetic ensemble by persuading her to leave her hair undone and tousled. As is so often the case in Miss Brown, however, Lee’s explicit critique of the gender politics of Aestheticism co-exists awkwardly with her Aestheticist eye for objects, settings and characters, marked here by the detail with which Lee elaborates the texture, colour and cut of the gown that apparently shames Anne so much. The woman robbed of agency, dressed up like a mannequin or stage performer, takes on an anachronistic grandeur that shocks her but which, it is implied, is ideally suited to a statuesque figure who transcends everyday modernity. If we compare this account with Lee’s (much briefer) description of seeing Jane Morris at her Hammersmith home in 1881, we can see a clear resemblance in the type of dress described – a white dress, of Grecian appearance – but without the authorial judgement of a woman humiliated by an imposed style. Mrs Morris, Lee wrote to her mother, ‘had on the usual crinkled white garb with a gold string round her waist or absence of waist; more beautiful and grand perhaps than in Florence’ (5 July 1881; Willis 1937: 70). Lee’s designation of this as ‘the usual’ and mention of her earlier meeting in Florence gives a strong impression that this was a customary mode of dressing for Jane Morris and, far from censuring it, Lee praises her beauty, implying the appropriateness of such unconventional attire for an exceptional figure. Others, too, repeated similar descriptions, such as Edmund Gosse who recalled Jane ‘dressed in a long unfashionable gown of ivory velvet’ in 1871 (Charteris 1931: 33) and Angela Thirkell’s memory of Jane still wearing ‘long white draperies’ in old age (Thirkell 1931: 23). Similarly, Katharine Adams, who had a lifelong association with the Morris family at Kelmscott, fondly recalled (twenty years after Jane’s death), ‘My last vision of Mrs Morris, in the white room [at Kelmscott Manor], she had put on a white silk gown & silver girdle to please me, & I told her how beautiful she was’ (4 November 1934; BL, Add. 71216). No pictorial record of Jane Morris in this Grecian style of dress remains to challenge the dominant image of the melancholy woman in ‘a long dress of dead purple stuff’ that Henry James lightly mocked.23 It was, however, the dominant style associated with Aesthetic dress, most notably through Whistler’s portraits of Joanna Hiffernan, such as Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl (1861), which itself

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 134

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

135

overlapped with the fashion for white garments and accessories triggered by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), in which the heroine Hilda – denizen of a coterie known as the ‘Aesthetic Company’ – habitually wears white.24 As Charlotte Gere has noted: ‘White had its own message for the Aesthetes: it was nostalgic, being the most frequently employed colour for dress at the turn of the eighteenth century, and unadorned, . . . it was purged of the meretricious trappings of cheap modishness’ such as was associated with the new aniline colours in women’s clothing (1996: 22). The Aesthetic origins of a white, Grecian-influenced dress may perhaps be traced to the Little Holland House circle in the 1850s, as depicted in G. F. Watts’ 1850s portraits of two of the Pattle sisters, Julia Margaret Cameron (1850–2) and, most markedly, Lady Sophia Dalrymple in 1854. Closely conforming to the descriptions of Jane Morris in a crinkled, diaphanous white dress, loosely-fitting, tied with a cord at the waist, with simple beads at the neck, this portrayal depicted a style apparently adopted by all the Pattle sisters, raised in India where the light muslins and fine cottons that draped easily, as well as the kinds of beads and bangles that accompanied this dress style, originated. As Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote of the Pattles: ‘To see one of this sisterhood float into a room with sweeping robes and falling folds was almost an event in itself, and not to be forgotten’ (1893: 13). Further proof of the cultural association between white dresses and female Aesthetic dress was the tendency in du Maurier’s Punch caricatures to depict Aesthetic women, especially Mrs Cimabue Brown, in a white dress, an association made all the more significant by the fact that this caricature had exaggerated features clearly modelled on Jane Morris: a tall, long-necked, undulating figure with drooping head, black frizzy hair low on her forehead, strong facial features with a melancholy expression and long tapered fingers (Fig. 3). Du Maurier probably did more to publicise the distinctive features of Jane Morris in this unflattering portrayal than any other representation, his influence evident even in Vernon Lee’s choice of surname for her version of Jane Morris in Miss Brown. In another caricature that reproduced Jane Morris’s features – in slightly less haggard and melancholy form, to suggest a more youthful figure, and in a dress that though pale has the suggestion of a floral pattern – du Maurier portrayed the Aesthetic woman opposite an unmistakable version of Oscar Wilde, the two identified as the ‘Intense Bride’ and ‘Aesthetic Bridegroom’ in the well-known ‘Six-Mark Teapot’ Punch cartoon in 1880 (Fig. 4). As the feminine and masculine embodiments of Aestheticism, the humour in this cartoon derives from their improbability as a married couple, knowingly implying their sexual

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 135

18/03/2013 15:50

136

Figure 3

Jane Morris

‘Frustrated Social Ambition’, Punch, George du Maurier (V&A).

dissonance as well as the incommensurability between Aesthetic men like Wilde and Aesthetic women like Jane Morris.25 The style of dress worn by du Maurier’s version of Jane Morris, however, conformed to the more structured design of commercial versions of Aesthetic fashion; the distinctive, full-sleeved, corsetless style worn by Jane Morris in photographs, paintings, and sketches is absent. The two forms of Aesthetic dress most associated with Jane Morris, then, – the loose, white, Grecian style and the dark, medieval-influenced, belted but uncorseted form – bore a clear relationship to her role as artist’s model and was influenced by Rossetti’s medieval aesthetic, which had also been earlier adapted by Elizabeth Siddall for daily wear (the full sleeve, for instance, permitting a greater freedom of movement invaluable for drawing and painting; Shefer 1985: 58). In the 1860s, Jane Morris adopted even fuller sleeves and added decorative techniques such as shirring which corresponded to the development of her embroidery skills through her work with her husband and the Firm. The wide sleeve and embellishment were, however, also gaining more currency in conventional fashion in this period so Jane Morris’s dresses reflect a dynamic exchange between professional modelling, contemporary fashion, and her own personal taste (Shefer 1985: 59). Throughout this period, she also continued to sew costumes for modelling purposes,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 136

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

Figure 4

137

‘Six Mark Teapot’, Punch, George du Maurier (V&A).

in collaboration with Rossetti, such as the pale overdress she made for La Pia de’ Tolomei (begun in 1868, continued in 1880) (Ormond 1974: 28). 26 Jane Morris’s dress, however, was not confined entirely to these two styles or colourings: photographs show her, for instance, in conventional travelling dress in studio portraits taken with the Cobden sisters and Thomas Cobden-Sanderson in Italy in 1881 and, in 1883, the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 137

18/03/2013 15:50

138

Jane Morris

American poet Emma Lazarus described meeting Jane Morris – looking ‘exactly like all the Rossetti pictures’ – and wearing ‘an esthetic [sic] dress of dark dull red, with a garnet necklace & cross . . . like an old Italian portrait’ (Young 1995: 111). Through her work with Rossetti, then, Jane Morris was exposed to a range of dress aesthetics from different historical periods and cultures (from Venetian to Japanese), to which she could bring her own design sense and taste, and embellish by drawing on the wide repertoire of embroidery skills first acquired through the collaborative endeavours at Red House and then developed further in the Firm’s textile business. What resulted was a personal style and aesthetic, adapted to movement and comfort and designed to accommodate the statuesque proportions of Jane Morris’s body. Despite the recent resurgence of scholarly interest in Aestheticism, women’s Aesthetic dress has yet to receive the kind of detailed, scholarly attention that has been extended to male Aesthetic dress and selfpresentation.27 Part of the reason is paucity of material: images and textual resources abound for figures such as Wilde and Whistler but far fewer survive of women aesthetes, with textual accounts particularly thin. From the Pattle sisters to Rosalind Howard, however, Jane Morris was associated with women who were known for their distinctive dress and advocacy of Aestheticist style that suggests a complex process of imitation, adaptation and innovation among women in these social networks, inflected according to individual preference, colouring, or favoured materials.28 Drawing from other vanguardist women of her acquaintance, Jane Morris adapted elements of design that endowed her with a distinctive identity, in turn influencing aspects of Aesthetic fashion as it was commercialised in this period.29 As Aestheticism took on a wider currency in Victorian culture, images of femininity identifiably based on the body and dress of Jane Morris were especially prevalent and her attributes ‘became the look associated with the Aesthetic Movement’: ‘her columnar neck, thick lips, heavy mantle of hair, welldefined jawline and brow, and boneless posture, all epitomized a revised standard of beauty popularized’ by Aestheticism (Casteras 1992: 31, 32). Far from being acknowledged as an avant-gardist figure, however, Jane Morris has been consistently anachronised as a mythic or medieval figure, far removed from the Victorian modernity she inhabited, a phantom or ghostly presence who ‘required to be seen to be believed, and even then . . . seemed dreamlike’ (Robertson 1931: 93) and could, in turn, induce a dream-like state in the observer.30 Neither simply a housewife, nor a creative artist like Elizabeth Siddall, Jane Morris confounded categories of feminine identity in a way that Aestheticism attempted to resolve through its dual construction of the feminine figure, ‘in the world

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 138

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

139

yet not of it’ (Psomiades 1997: 3), representing a contradictory interface between art and the social realities of economics and class.

Notes 1. See Saunders (2009) on Victorian representations of these queenly figures. The trope of rebellion that some women writers deployed through these queenly figures was absent from cultural discourse concerning Jane Morris by her contemporaries. It is interesting in this context to recall the recurring uncertainty about the title (and subject) of Morris’s only known oil painting for which Jane was the model, La Belle Iseult. Although often thought to be Guinevere (and hence linked to Morris’s early poem ‘The Defence of Guenevere’), Jane Morris later confirmed to May Morris that ‘La Belle Iseult is what the dear father always called his picture’ (7 July 1901; BL, Add. 45364). 2. Greenblatt thus distinguishes wonder from resonance which he defines as ‘the power of the defined object . . . to evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces from which it has emerged’ (1991: 42). 3. Glasier explicitly recorded that he had ‘seen her portrait in some of the reproductions of Rossetti’s pictures’ before meeting Jane Morris (1921: 45). 4. Pedrick was a relative of Henry Treffry Dunn, Rossetti’s friend and assistant. This anecdote also appeared (unsourced) in Gaunt (1942: 114). 5. The fullest account of the episode is found in Knight (1887: 95–6); William Michael Rossetti, while citing the various sources of the tale, refuted its truthfulness (1895: 254–5). See also Horner (1933: 9–10), although Horner mistakes the animal for a ‘gnu’; Prinsep (1904b: 285); and Pennell and Pennell (1920: 80). 6. In Whistler’s version, the provocation for the zebu’s rebellion was Rossetti pointing out the attributes of the zebu with his painter’s maul-stick (Pennell and Pennell 1920: 80). 7. For example, ‘Two things are wanted for the Moocow in its new house’, Rossetti wrote to Howell from Kelmscott in January 1873, in giving him instructions for purchases requested by Jane Morris (Cline 1978: 189). 8. Robertson was here reiterating a view he had already stated in his memoirs, Time Was: ‘She was a Lady in a Bower, an ensorcelled Princess, a Blessed Damozel, while I feel sure she would have preferred to be a ‘bright, chatty little woman’ in request for small theatre parties and afternoons up the river. Brightness might equally have been expected from Deirdre of the Sorrow, chattiness from the Sphinx. She was Venus Astarte, “betwixt the sun and moon a Mystery,” and there she had to stay’ (1931: 94). 9. According to Mills, Perlascura (1871) – a profile of Jane Morris in pastel on pale green paper – was the first published photograph of Rossetti’s work in 1877, undertaken by ‘The English Picture Publishing Company’ consisting of Frederic Shields, Charles Rowley and George Milner with some involvement from Madox Brown (Mills 1912: 204). Between late 1877 and mid-1878, Rossetti’s letters to Jane repeatedly refer to the progress of publication of autotypes based on his drawings of her, Perlascura

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 139

18/03/2013 15:50

140

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

Jane Morris and Silence (e.g. 19 December 1877; Bryson 1976: 47). In August 1878, Rossetti also told Jane he was considering the publication of ‘some dozen autotypes of you in a book – done on a moderate scale so as to make a large folio shape. I might call them “Perlascura: Twelve Coins of one Queen” and quote a motto from Dante’s first canzone in the Vita Nuova – . . . I should put a sonnet to each autotype’ (Bryson 1976: 75). The same year, however, Rossetti wrote to Shields about forged reproductions of his pictures: ‘Burne-Jones sent me to-day one of these heads sold as mine which a friend of his had bought. Of course it is a forgery, and I must take some immediate steps about it now . . . The mere prices charged for them are so trivial as to strike at the root of my market, and themselves so contemptible as to discredit me completely’ (Mills 1912: 232–3). As Buchanan put it: ‘When the Athenaeum — once more cautious in such matters — advertised nearly every week some interesting particular about Mr. Swinburne’s health, Mr. Morris’s holiday-making, or Mr. Rossetti’s genealogy, varied with such startling statements as “We are informed that Mr. Swinburne dashed off his noble ode at a sitting,” . . . when we read these things we might or might not know pretty well how and where they originated; but to a provincial eye, perhaps, the whole thing really looked like leading business’ (Buchanan 1997: 238). Tuite charts the emergence of ‘scandalous celebrity’ in the earlier Romantic period where the new economy of celebrity, as distinct from renown, did not ‘rely purely on fame as positive publicity but [could] incorporate and capitalize on the effects of negative fame or notoriety’ as well (2007: 78). In a letter to Jane, Rossetti admitted his reluctance to use her name in the title of a painting: ‘I have finished an old watercolour of the head of your portrait, and it comes well: it is for Valpy. I did not want it to be talked about among strangers by your name, so have christened it Bruna Brunelleschi, of course bearing on the dark complexion’ (27 February 1878; Bryson 1976: 54, emphasis added). In a letter written soon after this, Rossetti also disclosed that he had refused an offer to exhibit his work at the Grosvenor Gallery (although Jane had encouraged it), betraying his deep ambivalence about public display of his work and its association with Jane Morris. For example, Jane Morris described visiting the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878 (CH, J22/55/5) and Blunt’s diary records accompanying her there in 1885 and 1886 (FM, Indian Memoirs vol. IV: 112; and Diaries 18 January 1886: 21), as well as the Royal Academy in 1885 (FM, Indian Memoirs vol. IV: 50). In his analysis of nineteenth-century literary celebrity, Richard Salmon (2009) notes how the social practice of literary ‘lionism’ marked the intersection of an eighteenth-century culture of visual spectacle and sociality with the expansion of print culture to constitute a nascent form of modern celebrity in the Victorian period. Spartali Stillman had settled with her family in Florence in 1878, where she became a friend of Vernon Lee, and it was Marie who introduced Lee to Jane Morris in what would turn out to be a momentous introduction (in the light of Lee’s subsequent novel Miss Brown). Lee was also a friend of the writer and critic Carlo Placci, who published articles on Rossetti with views

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 140

18/03/2013 15:50

Icon

16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

141

similar to Lee’s, suggesting ‘their mutual influence, and possibly Placci’s dependence’ on Lee’s knowledge (Pieri 2004: 368; see also Colby 2003: 133–4). As early as the 1860s, Jane Morris had corresponded with Norton’s wife, Susan Sedgwick Norton (who, incidentally, had recommended the benefits of travelling to Italy), in letters which provided updates on the progress of Rossetti’s painting and William Morris’s writing as well as discussion of daily life matters (NFP, Am 1088.1). Rossetti, Hannay claimed, not only increasingly ‘confined himself to the three-quarter female portrait’ but ‘began to limit himself in colour to the dull blue dress, the blue-black head of hair – and what a mass of it there is! – the ashy faces with livid shades’ (1883: 131). A similar view, if expressed in more complimentary terms, was offered in an anonymous London Society article: ‘Why, too, did the artist model so many faces from one type, that of the Proserpine, a picture of remarkable merit? It must occur to the unprejudiced that Rossetti’s chief faults were monotony and morbid sentiment’ (Anon. 1883: 219). Rossetti’s letters provide evidence of Jane wearing the blue silk dress in daily life. Initially, he wrote recommending she should wear the dress before the sitting to ‘take away the stiffness’ (Fredeman vol. IV, 2004: 58) and on a later occasion wrote: ‘I have bethought that you wore the blue dress at your party and may possibly want it for tomorrow evening’ (7 March 1870; Bryson 1976: 37). See Novak (2008), however, on the fraught issue of Wilde’s agency and ownership of this distinctive identity derived from dress he adopted on his American tour. Painted on the frame of this portrait was the following: ‘Conjuge clara poeta et praeclarissima vultu, Denique picturea clara sit illa mea’ (‘Famous for her husband, a poet, and most famous for her face; so let this picture of mine add to her fame’). Ford believes it to have been a conventional dress simply worn without the crinoline hoops (2004: 311). Waggoner similarly reads the variations of hair as well as posture, props and dress as evidence of creative collaboration between the two (2010: 102–3). There are photographs, however, depicting an elderly Jane Morris dressed in white taken at Kelmscott Manor in the early 1900s (NPG, x27587) and both Evelyn de Morgan, in a study for The Hourglass (1905), and Charles Gere, in a water colour portrait (1900) also depicted Jane Morris dressed entirely in white. The success of Wilkie Collins’s sensation novel The Woman in White (1862), which inspired a range of successful merchandising including fashions, should also be mentioned in this context, again demonstrating the manner in which Aesthetic style incorporated, and moved between, high art and mass culture throughout this period. Humour is also coded in the pun on ‘consummate’ regarding the blue and white teapot, in turn gesturing to Wilde’s reported aphorism (‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china’; Ellmann 1988: 44).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 141

18/03/2013 15:50

142

Jane Morris

26. Charlotte Gere has also claimed that Jane Morris made costumes for models employed by her uncle, the artist Charles Gere (qtd in Wilson 1996: 36, n.8) and, in a letter to the artist in 1893 Jane Morris wrote: ‘Your gown is finished’ (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 248). 27. From an extensive literature, see Gagnier (1986), Shirland (2007) and Novak (2008). 28. Lady Frederick Cavendish wrote of Rosalind Howard: ‘She dresses madly in odd-coloured gowns with long trains, which cling around her unbecrinolined’ (Diary, 1865; qtd in Gere 1996: 16). 29. On the importance of fashion and modes of femininity in the dissemination of Aestheticism see, for example, Psomiades (1997), Schaffer and Psomiades (1999), Anderson (2001) and Vadillo (2005). 30. Such a response was not confined to male observers; after meeting Jane for the first time in 1859, Georgiana Burne-Jones remembered, ‘I dreamed of her again in the night’ (1904: 195).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 142

18/03/2013 15:50

Chapter 5

Home

[Morris’s] wife was beautiful and knew that to be so was part of her household business. George Bernard Shaw (1949: 7)

The story goes that the name of William Morris was ‘intimately associated with the arts of domestic decoration’, as a journalist for Cassell’s Saturday Journal noted in 1890 (Pinkney 2005: 44), and Morris’s own homes – Red House, Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott House – exemplified his philosophy of ‘The Beauty of Life’ (1880). But where is Jane Morris in this picture and what was her role in Morrisian domesticity? Was she simply part of the furniture, a decorative element in Morris’s ‘artistic mise-en-scène’ at home, as MacCarthy claimed (1994: 137)? From contemporary observations in the nineteenth century to the scholarly and biographical traditions surrounding Morris and Rossetti in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jane Morris’s role in the home is only fleetingly glimpsed. The connotation of immobility attached to the artist’s model, not to mention the strong association between Jane Morris and the ‘lady on the sofa’ myth, has meant that her domestic labour and creative collaborations at home have too often been overlooked. In a provocative account of the Red House years (1861–5), for instance, Amy Bingaman described the women of the Morris circle, including Jane, as ‘dolls in the elaborate play at Red House – props asked to play a part without reaping any remuneration or self-satisfaction’ (2000: 99) while more recently Deborah Lutz’s account of the collaborations and creation of objects ‘solidly expressive of relationships’ at Red House is entirely confined to the labour of men there (2011: 163). In accounts such as these, an emphasis on the importance of the concept of brotherhood in William Morris’s philosophy of communal creativity has meant that Jane Morris’s role in the artistic milieu she inhabited has been underestimated, with insufficient attention given to the meaningful work

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 143

18/03/2013 15:50

144

Jane Morris

that occupied her and connected her to others through creative collaboration and hospitality. The consistency with which Jane’s life has been read within romantic narratives of desire, obsession or betrayal – especially through her figurative presence in Rossetti’s art – has also contributed to the myth that her business was simply to be beautiful, to paraphrase Shaw. She has been seen as a Pia-like figure, forlornly isolated and without purpose, or – more commonly – associated with Persephone, pathetically and passively trapped in marriage, exemplifying an existential alienation.1 The Persephone association, however, is notable for the selective interpretation of the story that is presented. The rest of the Persephone story, such as the daughter’s yearning to return to the mother, goes unremarked in relation to Jane Morris: Demeter never figures in the story of Jane as Proserpine.2 This omission reflects a wider silence in the sources not only on the price of social mobility and the apparently irrevocable loss of origins it implied but also the significance of female relationships in her life more generally. Did Jane Morris ever see her mother again after her marriage? We don’t know; no one seems to have thought it worth recording.3 And what kind of relationship existed between Jane and her younger sister Bessie, who lived for many years with the Morrises and became an accomplished professional needlewoman? We know more about William Morris’s feelings for his sister-in-law – none of them positive4 – than about the sisterly relationship. William’s negative feelings towards other women to whom Jane was close – such as Marie Spartali Stillman5 – have also been recorded but the sources are relatively silent on Jane’s enduring female friendships, as well as those with Rosalind Howard, Susan Sedgwick Norton (wife of Charles Eliot Norton) or Olive Cockerell (Sydney’s sister). Only Georgiana Burne-Jones (in Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones) has left a lasting testimony to her friendship with Jane Morris and even that focuses on the early years at Red House. The relationship between Jane and her daughters has also received less attention by comparison with Jenny and May’s relationship with William Morris, for which the evidence of letters and common interests between father and daughters remain. May’s published writings and later correspondence, however, convey an affectionate relationship with her mother, while the insights of contemporaries such as Rosalind Howard, Marie Spartali Stillman and even Wilfrid Blunt provide a poignant account of Jane’s relationship with her elder daughter, Jenny. This chapter, then, will consider the textual record of Jane Morris as mother, friend and craftswoman, and the importance of the home as a site of creativity, hospitality and intimacy in her life. While the discord

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 144

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

145

within the Morris family has been the subject of much attention, it is easy to overlook the many ways in which Jane Morris put into practice her husband’s design principles at Red House and Kelmscott Manor, suggesting a shared philosophy of the home as a space of beauty, utility and hospitality that served to foster and deepen emotional networks among family and friends in the Morris circle. As throughout, my aim is to challenge the myth by re-examining textual representations of Jane Morris to locate opportunities for agency, not simply objectification or constraint.

‘So much love dearest’: Jane Morris at Home Could there ever be a more enchanting head of a household? whether she carved the mutton or cut the hair of the family, tuned all the time to that delicious laugh which one never forgets. Once at Kelmscott a number of us had been lounging and larking in the orchard. After a while Morris slipped off, and soon afterwards we saw him in a summer bower with his head bowed in his wife’s lap, having his hair cropped. What a subject for a picture flashed upon one – such a man, and such a woman! But wherever either or both of them were it seemed to be supremely perfect and to leave an impress never to be effaced. (Rowley 1911: 136)

The archival record of the courtship and wedding of William and Jane Morris can be reduced to four vignettes: Morris’s scribbled confession on his study for La Belle Iseult (‘I cannot paint you, but I love you’), discussed in Chapter 1; Val Prinsep’s story of surprising Morris reading Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge aloud to ‘his lady love’ in the lodgings shared by the artists during the ‘Jovial Campaign’ at Oxford (Prinsep 1904a: 170); George Boyce’s recollection of sighting Jane Burden at Godstowe during the period of her engagement (Surtees 1980: 26); and, finally, the wedding, where Morris’s friend, Rev. Dixon, mistakenly pronounced the couple ‘under the names of “William and Mary” Morris’ (BurneJones 1904: 194). None of these stories appear in Mackail’s Life of William Morris, which contains only four references to Jane in the Index. Similarly, other early accounts of Morris’s life not only refrained from mentioning any hint of scandal in his marriage but accorded a low representational priority to Morris’s wife, as relatively insignificant in the story of the great man’s achievements. As one early biographer put it, Jane necessarily ‘fades into the background of her husband’s overwhelming personality’ (Weekeley 1934: 51). It is not my concern here to provide a lengthy re-evaluation of the Morris marriage, assuming the resources for such an undertaking were available, but rather to consider

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 145

18/03/2013 15:50

146

Jane Morris

images that show the Morrises working and living together in ways that suggest shared ideals, despite the vicissitudes of illness, betrayal or absence. Everyday images recorded by some contemporary observers of the Morrises, such as Charles Rowley’s striking recollection at the opening of this section, have made little inroads on the mythic picture of marital estrangement between William and Jane, writ large through the relationship with Rossetti in particular. 6 ‘Love’ in the title of this section, then, quoting a letter from Jane to her daughter May, firstly denotes the forms of affection and attachment that linked the Morrises – parents and children – and distinguishes these everyday intimacies, in both their ordinariness and their complexity, from the transgressive desires and scandalous liaisons with which the name of Jane Morris is more usually associated. ‘Love’ is also intended to draw attention to the other kinds of affective relationships that Jane Morris’s letters chart, such as her enduring friendship with Philip Webb or her affectionate bonds with many female friends. In myriad ways, Jane’s correspondence shows how her life was embedded with the lives of others, whether through expressions of sympathy for their sorrows, delight in their achievements, or intense interest in their thoughts and feelings. Visitors to the Morris home in the 1890s observed a comfortable intimacy between husband and wife, such as the ‘regular evening employment’ of William and Jane: playing draughts together.7 In 1892, for instance, Sydney Cockerell observed the couple at play both at Kelmscott Manor in the summer (Cockerell Papers, BL, Add 52629: 52) and later in the year at Kelmscott House: ‘When I went up into the drawing-room to say goodnight Morris and his wife were playing at draughts, with large ivory pieces, red and white’ (6 November 1892; BL, Add 52629: 65). The illustrator Edmund New, in his ‘Diary of a Visit to Kelmscott Manor House’ in 1895, also recorded the Morrises playing draughts in the tapestry room and described daily life at Kelmscott where guests and hosts sociably engaged in their respective creative projects: ‘I soon set to work again [on sketching] while Mr Morris was designing some cretonnes and Miss Morris knitted; Mrs M[orris] joined us during the morning and continued embroidering a book cover on which she was engaged’ (Cox 1974: 6). Shared creative projects had been a feature in the Morris household since the beginning of the Morris marriage, particularly with the decoration of Red House, blending work and leisure and subtly disrupting the gender demarcation of domestic labour within the norms of Victorian middle-class social life. The decoration and furnishing of Red House was carried out by Morris’s circle of friends and artistic associates – men and women – and provided the impetus for the establishment of

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 146

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

147

Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company (later, simply Morris & Co).8 In the literature surrounding Red House and in biographical studies of Morris, however, there is an emphasis on this house solely as a material manifestation of William Morris’s aesthetic vision and philosophy of fellowship (see e.g. Waithe 2006). Red House has also previously attracted criticism for a perceived gap between the high-minded principles of artistic community to which Morris and his friends aspired and the more conventional domestic arrangements (a single-family dwelling with servants). In earlier feminist considerations of gender at Red House, for instance, the women of Morris’s circle are represented as marginalised from the outset. Notably, Marsh has argued that the women’s work as models and embroiderers at Red House was proof of their limited inclusion in the aesthetic community there: With the womenfolk detailed either to sit for or to embroider these figures of other women, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the artists’ preoccupation with illustrious but long-departed ladies, safely rendered into objects, reflects the process that was taking place in their own lives, as the men’s careers, charged with new responsibilities, pushed ahead while the women dropped into domesticity, relinquishing their own ambition. (1985: 192)

Marsh (as more recently Bingaman) charts a simple, if tragic, narrative of the women’s inevitable decline into domesticity while their husbands incrementally achieved acclaim as artists, writers or designers. Whether viewed as a foreshadowing of Morris’s creative or political development or as a place where middle-class women were objectified and domesticated, then, Red House has been insufficiently recognised as a space where the creativity of Jane Morris flourished and where she engaged in various creative projects – with her husband, with Georgiana BurneJones and others of the circle – that marked her introduction to aesthetic collaboration and laid the foundation of sustaining friendships. ‘Oh how happy we were, Janey and I’, Georgiana later simply put it, describing the Red House years (Burne-Jones 1904: 210). The creative experimentation that characterised the interior design at Red House was linked to a playful approach to everyday life which provided an opportunity – for the women as well as the men – to connect forms of labour and leisure in new ways and to forge new links of intimacy and creativity. The roles of producer and consumer, giver and recipient, artist and model, were fluid and the outcomes unpredictable.9 In Georgiana Burne-Jones’s account, based on her experience as a regular weekend visitor at Red House, the women were active in the banter, games and practical jokes, if not the more violent forms of horseplay in which the men engaged.10 Georgiana retained a strong memory,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 147

18/03/2013 15:50

148

Jane Morris

for instance, of a game of hide-and-seek (a common evening pastime) in which Jane Morris was ‘the seeker’: I see her tall figure and her beautiful face as she creeps slowly nearer and nearer to the room where she feels sure [Edward] must be, and at last I hear her startled cry and his peal of laughter as he bursts from his hiding-place. (Burne-Jones 1904: 212)

Despite the childish elements at Red House, as a locus of hospitality for a social network newly expanded by the marriages of Morris, BurneJones and Rossetti, it was also a home that required considerable domestic labour to maintain. With the births of Jenny and May in 1861 and 1862, Red House made many new demands on Jane Morris to manage different social roles and acquire diverse skills. If Victorian middle-class women had both a management and an ornamental role in the home (see Logan 2001: 89–90), however, Jane Morris was something of an exceptional case: at Red House, her daily life involved seeing, touching and using objects and spaces which she had either played a role in creating, received as gifts from her friends and collaborators, or observed undergoing the process of design and execution. The inclusion of her image in these objects and spaces – such as her depiction as Melidor in the scenes from the story of Sir Degravant in the drawing-room murals by Burne-Jones – may have marked a daily reminder of a new sense of entitlement that differed significantly from what we may imagine to be the habitus of a woman raised in a workingclass context. Pictures of Jane in medieval or regal mode adorning the walls or furniture of Red House could also have served a didactic purpose – reassuring Morris and others that his wife was qualified to reside in his ‘palace of art’ – but the coexistence of the playful alongside the pedagogic at Red House makes it difficult to assign a singular meaning to these images or to assume that all viewers would have interpreted them in the same way. While Marsh and Bingaman have associated such visibility in artistic representation with female objectification, it remains difficult to know if a Victorian working-class woman would have shared this perspective: social invisibility, in the form of a denial of social recognition or entitlement, may have been a more familiar form of objectification from Jane’s early life of straitened circumstances. Jane’s re-invention as a middle-class woman, then, took place within a space that was itself premised on re-invention, creativity, and play, and may more likely have been associated with greater freedoms for her than with increased constraints. The disparity between the sensory environment of Red House and that of her life before marriage may have led to a profoundly altered understanding of embodied agency for Jane Morris:

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 148

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

149

the textures and materials to hand – literally – would have differed markedly, leading to a different sense of the relation between body and environment, crucial to a process of re-making habitus. At the same time, however, some manual skills and dexterities (such as those associated with needlework or other domestic tasks) would have been carried over from earlier life, although dramatically re-configured in the decoration of her new home. Handling fabrics, fibres and yarns in the process of needlework, or painting patterns, juxtaposing colours and designs across different media, may have contributed to the formation of a new understanding of self and context that felt like an enhanced, rather than a constricting, mode of being in the world. The fact that such undertakings were, in many instances, shared with her husband may also have contributed to a sense of collaborative agency that shaped the early dynamics of this relationship. For example, according to Georgiana Burne-Jones, the painting of the drawing-room ceiling was a joint undertaking by William and Jane, a rather striking image of the couple engaged in practical and yet creative labour together (Burne-Jones 1904: 211).11 Reading backwards – from products to producers and processes – is of course inevitably a speculative process but in one textual fragment that remains we gain a glimpse of Jane Morris’s own sense of what was at stake in these early years of creative collaboration with her husband. On a single page, incomplete and unheaded, Jane described (presumably to May in her preparation of the Introductions to her father’s Collected Works) the early embroidery projects of the Red House years: It is not easy now to imagine the great difficulty we had then in hunting up materials for starting anything. There were no lessons to be had, everything had to be laboured at for a time often unsuccessfully, often not – but the failures were amusing too. The first stuff I got to embroider on was a piece of indigo-dyed blue serge I found by chance in a London shop, such as can be bought now in any shop in any street. I took it home and he was delighted with it, and set to work at once designing flowers. These we worked in bright colour in a simple rough way – the work went quickly and when finished we covered the walls of the bedroom at Red House to our great joy . . . Afterwards we studied old pieces and by unpicking etc. we learnt much but it was uphill work, fascinating but only carried through by his enormous energy and perseverance. (BL, Add 45341, original emphasis)

Jane’s recollection is significant in several ways. Firstly, while she stresses the historical importance of William’s role in the revival of traditional embroidery (her note begins: ‘I think you have not given quite enough prominence to the revival of old embroidery’ in his career), the account relates a far more collaborative process than this insistence would initially suggest. Writing almost fifty years after the events

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 149

18/03/2013 15:50

150

Figure 5

Jane Morris

‘Daisy’ wall hangings, now at Kelmscott Manor (Society of Antiquaries).

she is describing, Jane conveys a sense of immediacy in her account that testifies to the passion and enthusiasm of these first projects. Her husband’s ‘delight’ with her serendipitous purchase not only inspired his design but also instigated an ongoing process of experimentation, study and collaboration for the couple. This is not an account of a dutiful wife assisting her husband’s hobby, any more than the deliberately primitive, simple style of this piece (Fig. 5) resembled the embroidery designs typically worked by middle-class women at this time.12 It is a partnership in which education (‘we studied old pieces’) intertwined with practice and where the painstaking acquisition of new skills was a joint endeavour. Significantly, what is represented as serendipity could indicate an instance where habitus was instrumental in improvisation: blue serge, a rough and inexpensive fabric, was used in working-class garb – and later would be often associated with William Morris the socialist. It was not the kind of fabric usually connected with genteel embroidery but it was one that Jane Morris would use again for embroidery designs.13 The fact that Jane found this fabric ‘by chance’ suggests a capacity to recognise objects in a new context that comes from seeing the familiar in

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 150

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

151

an unexpected location, or vice versa. The daisy wall hangings were an audacious, almost avant-garde piece of design and Jane Morris’s pleasure and pride in them is still evident in this account. What she describes is in fact very much in keeping with William Morris’s later characterisation of ‘useful work’ (as opposed to ‘useless toil’; 1884), a central Morrisian principle where the temporality of satisfying creative labour (‘the work went quickly’) is markedly different from time-dragging drudgery and the outcome – like the process – is a shared pleasure (‘to our great joy’). Apart from this all-too-brief note on the daisy embroidery, the single comment concerning Red House attributed to Jane – that the coal cellar was too small – comes from a letter from Webb, apparently quoting back Jane’s own remark (BL, Add. 45343).14 Taken at face value, this attribution has been read as an indication of Jane’s practical, if not prosaic, response to the high ideals of Red House and perhaps as an implicit reminder of her working-class origins. While Jane’s long correspondence with Philip Webb was often marked by a lightness of tone, the extent to which class-based predispositions inflected the construction and understanding of comfort and intimacy at Red House should not be discounted. The sensory variety, novelty and excess that Red House offered a working-class woman could have potentially been overwhelming but may have been tempered by the fact that Jane did not acquire a ‘ready-made’ environment of privilege and comfort: she was instrumental in its production over time, actively collaborating with intimate others in an environment where play, failure and perseverance could happily co-exist and in which there was a shared sense of achievement. She was not simply a passive figure in an artistic tableau. The traces of Jane Morris’s ‘affective contact’ with Red House – the material evidence of her embroidery and paintwork, her recorded ‘delight’ and ‘joy’ with the processes of decorating, the anecdotes of her participation in games and jokes – suggest that it would be a mistake to discount her creative contribution there.15 If Red House marked a degree of experimentation with bourgeois domesticity in which William and Jane shared, what of their approach to parenting? According to May Morris, ‘Our parents always treated us with the respect due to childhood’ (vol. IV, 1911: xviii) and her father had no sympathy for modern or experimental methods of parenting such as he saw radical (unnamed) friends attempting to undertake with their children (vol. VI, 1911: xiii). There was, however, a degree of unorthodoxy in the raising of Jenny and May Morris (one unnamed cousin called the Morris girls ‘medieval brutes’, to May’s fury; vol. IV, 1911: xv) and May’s recollections often stressed the united approach by her parents in their advocacy of physical and intellectual freedom for

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 151

18/03/2013 15:50

152

Jane Morris

their daughters. Her ‘wily parents’ did not press ‘suitable literature’ on the children (vol. II, 1910: xviii) and, especially at Kelmscott Manor, Jenny and May fished, punted, climbed trees and roamed outdoors at will. With hindsight, the adult May understands that such freedoms may have been a strain on her mother. For instance, May’s childhood penchant for ‘roof-riding’ – scaling the gabled roofs of Kelmscott – almost ended in disaster one day, May recalled, when she found herself stranded astride a ‘specially inaccessible roof’: ‘It is not difficult to imagine my mother’s agony at discovering the situation: the poor soul bravely mastered her feelings and encouraged me to hold on, sending old Philip the gardener post haste for the longest ladders the village possessed’ (vol. VIII, 1911: xxx). We also learn from May some of the more ordinary struggles between parent and child such as her account of her mother’s role as ‘hair cutter for the family . . . [who] periodically cropped our thick and curly locks with a celerity and boldness that in later days has fairly taken my breath away. Sometimes she overdid it and then there was a general family protest’ (vol. 1, 1931: 151). While, in adolescence, the Morris girls were educated outside the home at Notting Hill High School, Jane Morris had been her daughters’ first teacher. In December 1869, Jane confided to Susan Norton her conflict between her sense of her own shortcomings as a teacher and her reluctance to relinquish this role: My two little girls are very well, growing very tall but not very strong, I am afraid; they are dear little companions to me, I am afraid soon I shall have to give up their teaching to more competent people, they want regular lessons, and those I cannot guarantee, I give them at all hours, and sometimes they look so tired that I feel quite cruel. (NFP, Am 1088.1: 427, original emphasis)

May, however, provided a different interpretation, exonerating her mother from blame by describing the many temptations of a Kelmscott summer as irresistible distractions from lessons: Poor mother manfully tried to make us do lessons – me at least – for Jenny as before mentioned was virtuous, also studious . . . Those glowing August mornings we sat in the pleasant cool of the Panelled Room trying to learn things about the Roman emperors, and outside the wide mullioned windows the blackbirds were chuckling and feasting among the gooseberries; golden stacks were growing roof-high in the yard outside, and the huge barn was alive with busy men and women. It was all too interesting: the Roman emperors were not to be endured for long, and mother became philosophical over my truancy. (vol. VIII, 1911: xxix)

In May’s idyllic recollections, as recorded in her Introductions to her father’s Collected Works, her mother is a steady presence and her father,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 152

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

153

while idealised, is often absent. Nonetheless there is a certain ambiguity that pervades Jane Morris’s depiction in May’s Introductions. While William’s male friends are introduced by name in Volume I, for instance, May only notes that ‘in April [1859] he married’ referring in the subsequent paragraph to ‘his wife’ (vol. I, 1910: xiii, xiv), as throughout she mostly refers to Jane as ‘mother’. In fact, her mother’s name does not appear until the Introduction to Volume IV – and then only in a quoted letter by Rossetti (‘I am painting a little portrait of Janey’; vol. IV, 1911: xx). A preference for the signifier ‘mother’ could indicate either intimacy or distance in the relationship but, in other ways, May’s method of depiction of her mother had a distinctive immediacy through her emphasis on sense memories as powerful evocations of childhood events and places. The child’s sensorium is depicted as acutely responsive to the smell, touch or taste of distinctive locations and the adult May is imaginatively transported back to those places in ‘memory-pictures’ by a sensory cue in the present: ‘Why does the taste of angelica on a cake remind me to-day of London soot and Queen Square gardens?’ she asks rhetorically, for instance (vol. III, 1911: xxv). In the context of this almost synaesthetic evocation of the past, May’s association of maternal affection with the haptic is striking. Recalling life in Queen Square (where the family moved from Red House in 1865), May interrupts her description of the dazzling attraction of the Firm’s glass-painting studios and the other-worldly wildness of the Queen Square garden to add: ‘And in all these pictures comes and goes the figure of my mother, in soft silk gowns that we loved and stroked’ (vol. III, 1911: xxv). The pleasure of stroking silk, described by May on more than one occasion in these Introductions, is an ambiguous memory of maternal presence: was it the mother or the mother’s dress that ‘we loved’? The implication, that the desired contact with the mother is displaced onto the silk dress, renders the garment a form of transitional object, which allows the satisfaction of the child’s desire for intimate contact while also marking the child’s awareness of her separation from the mother, necessary for the development of independence and creativity.16 May’s recollections of childhood describe a number of transitional objects through which the child enacted and mediated desire for both the mother and the father – as in the doll vignette, discussed in Chapter 2 – while also testing the boundaries of her relationship with her parents and her growing sense of independence from them. In these recollections of the uniquely creative and artistic environment of the Morris household, May’s emphasis on touch renders love a profoundly sensory experience, where to love is to touch and to touch is to love. The daughter’s lifelong fascination for, and cultivation of, sensory aesthetic

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 153

18/03/2013 15:50

154

Jane Morris

experience in the form of embroidery, drawing and textile design should then be seen as a significant weaving together of family affection with shared practices and objects, rather than a substitution for an absence of maternal love or contact. May’s recollections, however, provide another compelling example of the interpretative challenge presented by the figure of Jane Morris as she appears in the memories, fantasies or projections of others where she so often remains a secondary figure in relation to either Morris or Rossetti. May’s decision to adopt a child’s perspective in the Introductions – stating in the opening paragraph of Volume I that what will follow is ‘the child’s picture of “things as they seem” [which] may help to bring the reality before older eyes’ – gives an immediacy to her recollections, stressing their value as ‘personal impressions’ and justifying their ‘want of art’ (vol. I, 1910: ix). Her approach also allows the narrating voice to avoid confronting any awkward adult realities of her parents’ lives – another clear instance of a strategy of disavowal in representations of Jane Morris. May reiterates her intention to adopt a child’s point of view in the Introduction to Volume VIII, for instance, where she recounted Rossetti’s time at Kelmscott during her father’s absence in Iceland. ‘I am still telling my story from the child’s point of view’, May insists, perhaps disingenuously (vol. VIII, 1911: xxvii), after a lengthy account of her strong feelings for Rossetti at that time. Throughout this account, in fact, May shifts between an adult and child’s perspective in capturing her sense of Rossetti’s loneliness and melancholy (‘even the young child in pauses of happy playhours felt the loneliness’; ‘It is difficult even now to shake off the childish pang of self-blame that came over me at the sight’ of Rossetti sitting alone by the fire; vol. VIII, 1911: xxvi).17 Presenting Rossetti as a tragically solitary figure during this time (which, although not specified, seems to refer to Rossetti after his breakdown in 1872) is of course sharply at odds with the picture of Rossetti and Jane enjoying an idyllic tryst there during Morris’s absence that other biographers – and Rossetti’s own Kelmscott letters of 1871 – conveyed and one can only wonder at May’s insistence on this depiction. On the one hand it absolves her mother from any imputation of guilt concerning Rossetti’s presence in the house by stressing that Rossetti lived largely apart from the Morrises but, on the other, it could also imply that Jane was unable to extend any sympathy to Rossetti in his suffering and so perhaps unwittingly contributes to the myth of Jane Morris’s self-absorption.18 From May Morris, however, we also gain some insight into the more mundane and messy realities of daily life, providing an image of a sometimes volatile family. In a letter to George Bernard Shaw after his visit to

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 154

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

155

Kelmscott in August 1888, for instance, May depicted a lively domesticity far from the Victorian mythology of ‘separate spheres’ or the static tableau of achieved perfection such as characterised press accounts of ‘Morris at home’.19 ‘Father and Mother came down [to Kelmscott Manor] unexpectedly yesterday’, May wrote: but the former has taken the cooking into his own hands with a grand flourish of trumpets. You wd have laughed to see him this morning settled – or rather unsettled – at his designing and every five minutes hastening into the kitchen to raise the lid of his stew-pot & commenting in anxious tones as to the probabilities of an eatable dish being the result! They both asked after you & whether you had passed the time down here pleasantly. Mother enquired whether you had eaten well, adding suspiciously, “I hope you did not starve him?” I retorted with wounded spirit that though I might have laid the foundations of a life-long dyspepsia in you by unskilfully-prepared viands, your attack on them was so spirited as to entirely do away with her starvation-supposition which I considered a gratuitous insult. (BL, Add. 50541)

May’s amusing – if disgruntled – account suggests that William’s cooking ‘with a grand flourish of trumpets’ differed from the more usual mode of domestic management in which Jane was the dominant figure, while Jane’s inquiries after the well-being of May’s guest further suggest a mother’s sense of responsibility for the provision of hospitality, even in her absence. The complex but intense emotional dynamics between mother and daughter as represented in May Morris’s writings indicate that a simplistic account of Jane as an inadequate mother cannot capture the realities of the Morris family.20 In both private letters and published accounts, May often conveyed a sense of how her own self-image was inextricably bound up with her relationship with her mother, such as in a letter to John Quinn (the American lawyer and art patron with whom May formed a close if clandestine attachment after meeting him in New York in 1909), towards the end of her mother’s life: I am sorry my dear, you will not let me talk to Mother about you: it would give her so much pleasure to know that at last I had the happiness of loving and being loved. Imagine, dear John, the contrast between our lives – hers and mine: She, married so early, the anxieties and griefs that must come into the happiest of human existences all softened by this atmosphere of measureless love and tenderness: and I – not much to be said, but that I’ve lived a desert of loneliness and have set my teeth and endured it with a sort of dogged courage that has sometimes surprised myself. (Londraville 1997: 61)

May’s attribution of ‘measureless love’ to Jane here is juxtaposed with the representation of herself as a lonely and unloved woman who has

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 155

18/03/2013 15:50

156

Jane Morris

heroically endured life’s reversals. May’s self-representation, that is, is premised on the contrast she imagines between the daughter’s life narrative and the mother’s: again, Jane Morris’s life is presented as others wished (or needed) it to be. May betrays no awareness here of any difficulty or deprivation in her mother’s life, as if Jane had always enjoyed comfort and privilege. At the same time, however, May’s assumption of Jane’s pleasure in her daughter ‘loving and being loved’ reveals her security in her mother’s affections, her assurance that her mother desired her happiness. In contrast to May’s accounts of her mother, we have no corresponding material from Jenny Morris but some have nonetheless depicted this relationship in a negative light. W. M. Murphy, for example, in Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives, offered a typically unflattering if brief portrayal, repeating the familiar charge of Jane Morris’s faux gentility: Mrs Morris, a beauty, was restless and dissatisfied, and her qualities were passed on to her eldest daughter [in fact he is referring to May Morris, Jane’s youngest daughter]. The presence of Jenny put a stain on Jane Morris’s image of what an elegant family should be, but Morris himself loved the handicapped daughter, the only one in the family for whom he showed affection. (1995: 65)

Although biographers like Fiona MacCarthy have emphasised the close relationship between William and Jenny Morris – largely on the basis of their remaining correspondence, which is of course testament to their frequent separations – Jane Morris’s lifelong care for her invalid daughter was arguably the dominant feature of her everyday life from the late 1870s onwards. As the debate about whether to include mention of Jenny Morris’s epilepsy in Mackail’s Life of William Morris indicates (discussed in Chapter 2), the eldest Morris daughter’s health was a matter that was veiled in a degree of concealment beyond the circle of family and friends and it is reasonable to conclude that some Victorian acquaintances who attributed a generalised state of melancholy withdrawal to Jane Morris were not fully aware of the ‘home sorrows’ – as Jane put it in a letter to Blunt (Faulkner 1986: 60) – that affected all the Morrises through their anxiety for Jenny. As late as 1907, Georgiana Burne-Jones – who had known Jane since her marriage – observed: ‘a week in Jenny’s company has made me understand Mrs Morris’s life as I never did before’ (23 July 1907; V&A, MSS 86/55/45), powerfully conveying the significance of Jenny’s epilepsy in Jane’s life. Jane was, however, more candid about the demands of Jenny’s care with Blunt than with any one else. After a serious episode with Jenny in August

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 156

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

157

1885, she wrote: ‘It has been a dreadful grief for us all, worse for me than for anyone, as I have been so constantly with her, I never get used to it, I mean in the sense of not minding, every time the thing occurs, it is as if a dagger were thrust into me’ (Faulkner 1986: 19). Similarly, in 1888, Jane wrote to Blunt, ‘my doctor says I must never again live with Jenny while she is in her present condition, my brain was suffering from it’ (Faulkner 1986: 18). For the remainder of her life, Jane would be the chief carer for Jenny – supplemented by a succession of nursing companions – and her correspondence with Blunt, Webb, Cockerell and others repeatedly charts episodes of Jenny’s serious decline followed by varying degrees of recovery and ‘some new treatment we are about to try’ (Faulkner 1986: 18), a pattern that must have been deeply traumatic for all concerned. The inadequate medical understanding of epilepsy at this time meant that not only was Jenny’s health unpredictable but that those closest to her felt a sense of their own impotence regarding her illness.21 Jenny Morris suffered extended periods of ill health in 1889 and 1890 but in mid1890 Jane wrote again to Blunt that Jenny ‘has recovered with her usual rapidity, and is quite unconscious of having caused me anxiety—what a mystery such an illness is! I feel angry at not being able to penetrate it’ (13 June 1890; Faulkner 1986: 44). On 11 February 1891, Jane reported to Blunt another attack of Jenny’s that had coincided with the rest of the family’s influenza but ‘all are now happily well, and life is going on smoothly for a while’ (Faulkner 1986: 41). In fact it turned out to be a brief respite: Jenny contracted meningitis (‘brain fever’), followed by William’s physical and emotional breakdown. ‘The shock of Jenny’s illness was too much for him,’ Jane wrote to Blunt, ‘and he broke down entirely a few days afterwards . . . I fear it will be a long time before he is anything like his former self’ (13 April 1891; Faulkner 1986: 52). (The following month Blunt recorded in his diary that Jane, too, appeared ‘much aged’; Faulkner 1986: 53.) After Jane Morris’s death, Marie Spartali Stillman conveyed, in simple but affecting terms, the responsibility that Jane had felt for Jenny’s care when she wrote to Cockerell that ‘Mrs Morris wanted to live on for Jenny’s sake because she felt how Jenny would miss her’ (V&A, ML/1958/692/129). If the bond between Jane and her daughters was one often associated with anxiety (whether because of Jenny’s health or Jane’s concern over May’s ill-fated marriage), a more positively sustaining connection between the Morris women was provided by Kelmscott Manor, a place that seemed to take on even greater emotional significance for them after the death of William. Jenny ‘never wearies of this place – where she knows every tree and plant’, Jane had written in 1901 (BL, Add 52416)

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 157

18/03/2013 15:50

158

Jane Morris

and in 1910, May described her daily life at Kelmscott with her mother in evocative terms that wove together family history and an intense attachment to place. After a draining day in London, May recounted cycling to Kelmscott Manor from the train station on a rainy evening: Then at the end of it, the kind soft lights of the house among the tossing elms – and groping at the gate in the wall, and stepping into the fragrant quiet garden after that turmoil, and the beautiful picture through the mullionwindows (curtains drawn back to welcome me), with the blazing hearth in a white room, and my mother, all white too, sitting there, waiting – for a second, I put myself ‘outside myself’ and felt how full of wonder and enchantment such an arrival would be if it were new to one, – not part of one’s life. (Londraville 1997: 62)

May’s letter went on to describe an easy companionship with her mother at Kelmscott, its ordinary activities, and her sense of the continuities that bound past and present, art and domesticity, in the Morris family life: Mother and I lunch together, and she goes to rest, and I work on, not going out much beyond the garden . . . We sit in the parlour at tea and for the evening – a delightful room white panelled, airy and roomy, somehow, tho’ not very large. There are jewels of Persian rugs about the floor, a painted settle of Red House days on one side, opposite, my Father’s portrait, and his own Iseult picture, D.G.R.’s drawings of ‘Jenny and May’ – And we are lighted not by globes of electric light, my dear, but by modest candles in branches of old Sheffield plate. I occasionally play Bach and Handel on a little old piano, but generally settle to proof-reading. After dinner we play a dreadful game called Patience. (Londraville 1997: 62, original emphasis)

A letter Jane wrote to May Morris from Kelmscott towards the end of her life similarly conveyed a sense of her bond with her youngest daughter through their shared affection for Kelmscott and its simple pleasures: Darling I am so glad you enjoyed yesterday, it was one of the most wonderful I ever remember. I was tempted to go out after tea and saw such a sunset with the harvest moon rising in the other direction, the men working in the corn:fields, many of them on the wains showing clear against the sky, a most lovely picture altogether, it made one feel happy and grateful[. R]ain today. So much love dearest Mother. (BL, Add 45341)

After Jane’s death, Quinn noted the association between Jane and Kelmscott: ‘You of course will be reminded every place you turn at Kelmscott of your mother’ (Londraville 1997: 149) and May sought to make this association an enduring one, just as Jane had done after William’s death, by commissioning two cottages in Kelmscott ‘in memory of my Mother’ (23 April 1916; Londraville 1997: 175).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 158

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

159

While the significance of Kelmscott Manor for William Morris, and its significance in the relationship of Jane and Rossetti, has been widely acknowledged, few have emphasised the importance of Kelmscott in the life of Jane Morris but much of Jane’s extant correspondence concerns matters relating to Kelmscott – invitations and arrangements concerning visits, descriptions of the house and garden, transactions concerning improvements, or events in the village.22 Those correspondents closest to her, however, drew an indissoluble connection between Jane Morris and the beauty and hospitality of the place. Webb, for instance, stressed the association between Jane Morris and Kelmscott Manor in a letter to Jane written in 1901: For some kind of unconscious sub-reasoning I feel more than usually glad of your being at Kelmscott again, for the place fits the you I know so well – ‘Tis the best of ‘settings’ for you: In some (shall I not say many?) ways, you always make Kelmscott attractive: for what you are, do, or wear, never goes amiss with its simplicity. (6 March; BL, Add. 45343, original emphasis)

Long before this, however, Webb had described in idyllic terms the hospitality of Kelmscott. Writing to Jane and her daughters while they were in Italy in 1877, Webb recalled a previous visit to the house: The other day the word “chittabob” came into the top part of my body and I tried to think of the rest of the abracadabra chatter wh[ich] was so amusing at Kelmscott, but . . . I was forced to remember visible signs – The fire, the draught-board, the kittens, & mother Janey coiled up on the sofa – To say nothing of ladders in apple trees, starlings, shooting the footbridge at the weir, feasts in the dining-room, & plumcake in tapestry chamber . . . – How much easier it is to remember a picture than a sentence! (BL, Add. 45342)

Webb’s whimsy, with its nonsense language and images of disordered superabundance at Kelmscott, evokes a scene of beneficent plenitude and informality over which ‘mother Janey’ presided. While Webb’s letter included the customary depiction of Jane on the sofa, he implies no dereliction of duty in the provision of hospitality but rather a utopian ease in which all share and that spills over to different spaces within and without the house. After William Morris’s death, Jane continued to host a steady stream of visitors at Kelmscott Manor each year between the months of March and October.23 While letters exchanged with Cockerell or Webb furnish a picture of life at Kelmscott, we lack an extensive archival record from Jane’s female friends and regular guests at Kelmscott like Mary Augusta de Morgan and Marie Spartali Stillman. Mary de Morgan, sister of William de Morgan and author of The Wind Fairies and other well-received volumes of fairy tales, stayed for lengthy summer visits,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 159

18/03/2013 15:50

160

Jane Morris

attesting to the significance of the relationship between the two women, a tie further strengthened by the women’s shared involvement in embroidery work both for Morris & Co and personal projects (such as the coverlet for William Morris’s bed, to be discussed further below).24 It is also interesting to speculate whether Mary de Morgan was the ‘ladyfriend’ of her mother’s described by May Morris in connection with supernatural events at Kelmscott (the house, May wrote, ‘is supposed to be haunted; the villagers won’t approach it after dark etc etc’; BL, Add 50541). Writing to the strictly materialist Shaw, May described the women in gently mocking terms: I am not allowed to see ghosts: my mother & a lady-friend have monopolised them most unfairly. They hear heavy weights dragged about above their heads, dashing carriage-wheels on gravel drives beneath their windows where no drives are, bells ringing from empty rooms &c, while I am considered unworthy supernatural notice. (BL, Add 50541)

Both Mary de Morgan and Jane Morris are known to have had an interest in spiritualism and the frequency of Mary’s visits to Kelmscott makes her plausible as the friend to whom May referred.25 Jane Morris and Marie Spartali Stillman’s friendship had endured since at least the late 1870s, although the women were first associated through their earlier modelling for Rossetti in the 1860s. Jane had visited Marie in Italy26 and when Marie was in England, her hospitality was reciprocated at Kelmscott Manor. Writing to Blunt in 1905, Jane offered an image of the women’s quiet companionship at Kelmscott during one of Marie’s visits: ‘I have had my dear friend Marie Stillman with me the last fortnight. She paints quietly in the garden making pretty portraits of different bits of it, and I read or work’ (Faulkner 1986: 124).27 On Jane’s death, Spartali Stillman wrote to May Morris: ‘No heavier cloud could come over me than losing this dear friend’ (V&A, MSL/1958/692/129). Another significant female friendship – albeit of shorter duration – connected with Kelmscott was Jane Morris’s relationship with Sydney Cockerell’s sister, Olive, an artist and illustrator whose drawings had earned the admiration of John Ruskin and who shared an interest in gardening with Jane.28 Olive’s first visit to Kelmscott in 1901 initiated an ongoing friendship with Jane (‘I foresee we shall be great friends’, Jane wrote to Sydney; V&A, MSL/1958/692/64), to her brother’s delight. He replied: All that you saw in Olive is abundantly there. She is utterly guileless & unselfish, but she thinks [so] little of herself that undiscerning people take her at her own low valuation and this makes her silent and difficult. She came back radiant from Kelmscott . . . and she was full of your kindness, and of the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 160

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

161

curious fact that you had not seemed to find her the bore that she considers herself to be! (29 October 1901, BL Add. 52670)

Sydney’s description of his sister as ‘silent and difficult’ sounds uncannily like observations of Jane Morris made by some Victorian observers: Jane’s warm hospitality and enduring affection for Olive may signal an emotional response to the young woman based on a recognition of shared traits, or at least a sympathy for the misconceptions that others could attribute to such traits. The goddaughter of Octavia Hill, Olive Cockerell was also involved in slum philanthropy – her brother refers to Olive’s ‘mews & her rent collecting’ in faintly disparaging terms (BL, Add 52670) – and her many responsibilities and occupations meant she was not able to visit Jane as often as she might have wished. To Jane, Olive’s ‘sweet natural ways were very consoling’ and, after this first visit, she invited Sydney and Olive to spend Christmas at Kelmscott with her (V&A, MSL/1958/692/64 and MSL/1958/692/68). Olive’s artistic endeavours also marked a common interest with other female friends of Jane’s, like Spartali Stillman, and suggests that Jane particularly enjoyed the company of creative women who in turn found Kelmscott a source of inspiration and artistic opportunity.29 Just as, at Red House, Georgiana Burne-Jones conveyed a sense of female networks of friendship and creativity, so in the friendships most closely associated with Jane Morris at Kelmscott Manor we can see the continuation of a pattern of aesthetic labour and affectionate bonds between women – not least, it should also be remembered, between Jane and her daughters. Jane Morris’s connection with Kelmscott was finally secured when, towards the end of her life, she undertook the purchase of the house. In a letter to Blunt, however, Jane distinguished between her connection with Kelmscott Manor and her ownership of it: You will have heard from S. C. Cockerell that I am to be the proud possessor of this place soon, and it makes May very happy to think of, and that is a pleasure for me. I care but little for myself as it will not make much difference in my way of life. (WSRO)

Jane’s proprietorial role at Kelmscott had in fact been evident much earlier than this, especially in her project to build two workers’ cottages in the village after her husband’s death. In the absence of Jane’s side of the correspondence, it is necessary to rely on the letters of Philip Webb, the architect for the cottages, to provide an account of Jane’s commitment to this project. From details of design concerning both practicality and beauty (Jane had apparently sent ‘sketches of the outside’ as well as notes in letters to Webb; BL, Add 45342) to the frequent accommodation

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 161

18/03/2013 15:50

162

Jane Morris

of Webb’s architectural colleague at Kelmscott Manor, Jane played an active role throughout the duration of construction. The Kelmscott cottage project is open to a number of interpretations: as a homely application of her husband’s ethos of hospitality, or as a diminution of his radical social views into a more acceptable form of philanthropy. The couple had, however, shared a philanthropic role in the community during William’s lifetime, as a letter from William to Horace Meeres, the vicar of Kelmscott, in the winter of 1890 attests. William had asked Meeres to ‘do me the kindness to see to the distribution of the enclosed £5 amongst the Kelmscott poor people . . . Mrs Morris intends writing to you on the subject, as she has some wishes as to part of it at least’ (Kelvin vol. III, 1996: 249). The implication that Jane had more specific local knowledge of the needs of the community suggests an involvement in village life that exceeded that of a visiting tenant. The cottages should be seen, then, as a gift of beautiful utility, a material manifestation of her husband’s philosophy of the beauty of life. A guiding principle and a word repeated in Webb’s letters – often clearly echoing the letter from Jane to which he is replying – is ‘simplicity’, a term that seems to be a shorthand in the lexicon of their letters for a range of meanings: a sense of harmony with the built and natural surroundings of Kelmscott; practicality for everyday life; and unostentatious beauty. These principles were also exemplified in the handiwork of Jane Morris, as I will examine in the final section of this chapter.

Si je puis: Jane Morris’s Creative Agency If we consider our needlework to be an art, we must take care that it fulfils the first conditions of a work of art; namely, that it should be conceived, arranged, and carried out by one and the same person. Division of labour is good for getting through the drudgery of manufacture, but bad for works of art. (Lucy Crane 1886: 95)

During her lifetime, Jane Morris was acknowledged as a skilled embroiderer but, as the epigraph from Lucy Crane (older sister of Walter) suggests, the recognition of women’s needlework as artistic achievement has been compromised by the collaborative mode that needlework often required or fostered.30 While William Morris’s mastery of multiple arts and crafts did not detract from his reputation as an artist-craftsman, the position was more fraught for women, especially given the strong association between needlework and feminine domesticity. May Morris was able to forge a successful career as a craftswoman and designer for Morris & Co – rising to manage the textile division of the company –

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 162

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

163

and her aunt, Bessie Burden, also established a career as a professional needleworker31 but Jane Morris’s skills could still easily be seen as an aspect of her domestic role encompassing household management as well as gardening, music, interior design, and book-making. While Jane was hardly unique among middle-class women in possessing such skills, what concerns me here is how such interests were a means of connection and collaboration with others, and how we might understand this aspect of Jane Morris’s work as exemplifying William’s ideals of expressive, non-alienated labour rather than simply as feminine proficiency. In the earlier discussion of Jane’s artistic modelling (in Chapter 4), I suggested that such labour be understood as a form of artistic co-production, a shared investment in aesthetic practices, and thus a mode that challenged the dominant view of the autonomous male artist. In that vein, I want to consider here the kinds of collaborative creative labour that Jane Morris shared with others, including Mary de Morgan and Wilfrid Blunt. Although she did not have the same degree of visibility in Morris and Co. that her husband and youngest daughter did, Jane Morris was a more active participant in the ‘household business’ than Shaw suggested. Besides embroidery commissions that she had carried out for the Firm from its earliest days, which included the oversight and management of other women employed by the Firm for such projects,32 Jane’s letters show how she identified with the artisanal endeavours of the family. In a letter to Sydney Cockerell in 1899, for instance, Jane wrote: I and May [sic] have just come back from the New Gallery. I think our things look extremely well. I was greatly pleased and told everybody so. Some of the designs I had not seen since the day they were finished.33 (V&A, MSL/1958/692/54)

More broadly, however, Jane Morris identified with what became known as the Arts and Crafts movement, as comments recorded by Thomas Cobden-Sanderson in his journal for 1883 also demonstrated. On 24 June, Cobden-Sanderson wrote: I was talking to Mrs Morris after supper, and saying how anxious I was to use my hands – “Then why don’t you learn bookbinding?” she said. “That would add an Art to our little community, and we would work together. I should like,” she continued, “to do some little embroideries for books, and I would do so for you.” (1969: 94)

What is in effect Jane’s invitation to aesthetic collaboration (implied as the basis of ‘our little community’) fires Cobden-Sanderson’s enthusiasm: ‘Shall bookbinding, then, be my trade? I mentioned it to Annie on

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 163

18/03/2013 15:50

164

Jane Morris

Figure 6 Jane Morris’s booklet, a gift to Rosalind Howard (Castle Howard Archives). Reproduced with the kind permission of the Hon. Simon Howard.

our way home’ (1969: 94). Two days later, Cobden-Sanderson began to make plans in earnest and approached the binder, Roger de Coverly, who had a small family workshop, to learn the craft. It is only after these events that Cobden-Sanderson records reading William Morris’s essay, ‘On the Lesser Arts’, considered the call-to-arms for the Arts and Crafts Movement, and was inspired afresh: ‘Shall I at last do something to leave behind, and to be a silent joy for me long years to come?’ (21 July; 1969: 97). By early 1885, Cobden-Sanderson recorded working on ‘Mrs Morris’s books’ (1 February; 1969: 206): ‘Yesterday I finished four books for Mrs Morris, and took them to her that she might see them before to-morrow – to-day – when she goes to Calais en route for Italy’ (2 February; 1969: 207). Given the strong association between William Morris and the reclamation of artisanal book-making and printing skills, most notably due to his establishment of the Kelmscott Press, it is interesting that Cobden-Sanderson’s account of his induction into this craft is primarily attributed to Jane Morris who, as mentioned in Chapter 3, is known to have made three bound keepsake books and a fourth paper-bound booklet (the latter a gift to Rosalind Howard, see Fig. 6).

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 164

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

165

Jane’s bound books – which include a wide range of quotations from diverse sources as well as patterns, drawings and other embellishments in red, gold and black ink – were made using a variety of materials (such as blue silk end-papers, red leather and green velvet).34 In the creative practices associated with handmade books, however, Jane Morris had the examples of both William Morris and Rossetti before her. While her husband was primarily interested in typography and page design, Rossetti focused more on general book design and decoration (McGann 2000: 68–70; see also Grieve 1973) but, for both men, the handmade book was also associated with gift-giving: Morris had presented A Book of Verse (featuring calligraphy and page decoration by Morris, illustrations by Edward Burne-Jones) to Georgiana Burne-Jones in 1870; and Rossetti had produced the notebook, ‘The Kelmscott Love Sonnets’, a sequence of twenty-five poems written in the early 1870s and arranged in a notebook for Jane as an act of ‘poetic gift-making’ (McGann 2000: 75): Rossetti fair-copied the sonnets as a deliberately chosen sequence constructed from a larger body of sonnet materials . . . Indeed, it is clear that the sequence originally had twenty-seven sonnets and not twenty-five, for two leaves have been carefully cut away from the notebook with the sonnet sequence . . . [H]e probably copied the sonnets and gave her the gift of the notebook in the summer of 1874, when he was leaving Kelmscott for what turned out the last time. (McGann 2000: 75)

Like Morris’s and Rossetti’s, then, Jane Morris’s handmade books as material objects signified, in part, their capacity to re-present the self who had made the object by constructing, arranging, embellishing, and juxtaposing texts in a new context of her own design and decoration. In her study of women bookbinders, however, Marian Tidcombe considers Jane Morris’s efforts as ‘rather pathetic attempts’ and concludes: The purpose and meaning of these little hand-bound booklets is not wholly clear, and it would be a mistake to take them for personal expressions of Janey’s inner soul, but the quotations used must surely represent something of her tastes. (1996: 195)

Tidcombe’s reluctance to make too grand a claim for Jane’s handmade books is understandable: any artefact mediates between the subject who produced it and the consumer-observer, it can never provide a transparent glimpse into the producer’s soul. In a domestic context shaped by the impact of Morrisian aesthetic philosophy which stressed collective creativity and the value of the handmade object, however, these books situate Jane Morris within a network of craftspeople, in sympathy with the ideals of her husband and those closest to her.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 165

18/03/2013 15:50

166

Jane Morris

Not all of Jane Morris’s book design work was confined to the domestic sphere. In 1888, she designed the cover – a simple garland of shamrock leaves forming a border – for Wilfrid Blunt’s volume of ‘Irish poems’, In Vinculus (Kegan Paul, Trench and Co, 1889), deriving from his imprisonment in Ireland for offences relating to Home Rule campaigning. In his Secret Memoirs, Blunt noted: ‘Mrs Morris, who loved me, had designed the cover of it, with the shamrock leaves’ (FM, Vol. XIII: 20) and Jane had written to Blunt in December 1888 to tell him she had completed her design: I achieved the design for your bookcover, but have had no proof yet, so I don’t know how it looks in colour, I fear it is not very like a shamrock. Mr Kegan Paul forwarded me a proof of the portrait etching [for the frontispiece, by Leopold Lowenstein], which I thought exceedingly clever, it seemed to me to need a slight alteration however which I pointed out in returning it. (Faulkner 1986: 22)

Jane’s uncertainty about the merits of her design is in curious tension here with her more assertive action regarding the frontispiece (in ‘need [of] a slight alteration . . . which I pointed out’) but her letter conveys her sense of shared responsibility for the book’s production in collaboration with the author, publisher and etcher. Moreover, a form of collaboration continued when, in 1891, the newly-established Kelmscott Press printed a volume of Blunt’s poetry. ‘The printing is now fairly started,’ Jane wrote to Blunt at the end of February, ‘though the work goes very slowly with our two men, soon we shall take two more and get on much faster. Your book I believe will be the third produced by the “Kelmscott Press”’ (Faulkner 1986: 51). Jane’s usage of the firstperson plural here in referring to undertakings such as the Kelmscott Press implies a sympathetic identification with her husband’s work and ideals and her sense of her role as mediator in the Press’s publication of Blunt’s work.35 Around this time, Blunt’s diary also recorded his developing friendship with William Morris so the Blunt book published by Kelmscott Press gave a material form to the rather unconventional triangular relationship between Blunt, Morris and Jane who each, in their own way, invested feelings of pride and achievement in its production. Perhaps the most significant example of Jane Morris’s creative agency was a work of embroidery that drew a direct link between her own creativity and that of her husband, grounding both in the evocative location of Kelmscott Manor: a bed coverlet for William’s bed there, designed by May and embroidered by Jane, with assistance from her friend Mary de Morgan (Fig. 7).36

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 166

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

167

Figure 7 Coverlet for William Morris’s bed embroidered by Jane Morris and Mary de Morgan, Kelmscott Manor (Society of Antiquaries). Photo by Sam Drake and Jo Fernanades. Tate Photography.

Unlike the richer and more highly decorated hangings for this bed that incorporated flowers, foliage, birds and text – also designed by May and based on her father’s Trellis design – the coverlet is a relatively simple, gridded pattern of flowers but is noteworthy for additions along the bottom edge on both sides that are on a much smaller scale than the main design of flowers. Taking advantage of the spaces in the pattern left along the border, someone – Jane Morris, I conjecture – has included elements that are not part of, or in keeping with, the original design. Images of local fauna (including several different birds, fish, a ladybird, caterpillar and snail) and the Manor itself are stitched in a simple, naïve style along the border (Fig. 8). On the bottom right corner is also embroidered, ‘Si je puis. Jane Morris Kelmscott’ (Fig. 9). This coverlet raises questions about its meaning and significance for those who produced it such as why these additional elements were added, and why they were executed in such a simple technique (remembering that Jane Morris was a highly-skilled embroiderer for Morris & Co.). These additional motifs both domesticate and personalise the Morris design, situating it firmly in a specific

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 167

18/03/2013 15:50

168

Jane Morris

Figure 8 Detail, Kelmscott bed coverlet (Society of Antiquaries). Photo by Sam Drake and Jo Fernandes. Tate Photography.

place through the inclusion of signifiers of Kelmscott. William Morris of course frequently drew on local nature in his designs, naming them to make this locality explicit (such as ‘Everdene’ or ‘Medway’). He also depicted homely creatures such as blackbirds and rabbits in his designs for fabrics, wallpapers and tapestries. Jane’s incorporations, then, are another instance of her own interpretation and application of design

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 168

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

169

Figure 9 ‘Si je puis. Jane Morris. Kelmscott.’ Detail, Kelmscott bed coverlet (Society of Antiquaries). Photo by Sam Drake and Jo Fernandes. Tate Photography.

principles that indicate a commonality with her husband even as they also draw attention to her participation in the production process. Her additions to the coverlet associate William and Jane with Kelmscott as a place dear to both husband and wife and the coverlet’s status as a gift to her husband marks a gesture of acknowledgement of the bonds that connect them. But it is the inclusion of her signature that seems especially significant on this piece of creative work. The signature is both a writing of the self and a locating of self, through the inclusion of the word ‘Kelmscott’: situating the creative subject in a specific place implies both the inspirational nature of the location (Kelmscott is a place for art and creativity) and her own belonging there (as an artist/creator). Jane’s self-proclaimed status as an artist/craftswoman is further reinforced by the phrase that

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 169

18/03/2013 15:50

170

Jane Morris

precedes her signature: ‘Si je puis.’ This had been a motto adopted by her husband since the earliest days of his experiments in design and craftsmanship, marking what was initially an aspirational claim to artistic agency (going back to the Red Lion studio he shared with Edward Burne-Jones), and was also incorporated in designs at Red House. Morris’s motto, however, like Jane’s signature on the coverlet, to some extent undercuts the collaborative principles practised at Red House: ‘If I can,’ by its first-person signifier, seems to return to the individual artist although the conditionality of the French gives a tentative quality to the claim.37 Back in the Red House days, this problematising of individual achievement was played up by Rossetti’s response, seeking to tease Morris by defacing the motto in places to read ‘As I can’t’, a provocative jibe that was clearly intended to question Morris’s capacities during a time when the loyalties and rivalries of the group were re-aligning (Burne-Jones 1904: 209).38 With the success of Morris & Co., as well as Morris’s literary achievements, we do not see the motto appearing much in Morris’s later life and designs, so it is notable that Jane includes it here. Like the fauna additions, it is in part a message to her husband – signalling a shared history and common aspirations – but it is simultaneously a claim to her own creative agency that firmly situates her in a (family) history of design. Just as Morris used the phrase even in objects that were collaboratively produced, as if to articulate a common aim shared by the group of friends, artists and craftspeople, so too could Jane’s echoing of this motto be seen as an aspirational statement of creative agency that only makes sense within a context shared with others. Jane’s signature, however, also indicates a continuity with women’s textile culture, as outlined by Christine Bayles Kortsch who notes the important practice of women ‘marking’ their own linens or other similar objects with their names or initials, as a form of ownership (2009: 8). Kortsch’s exploration of nineteenth-century women’s ‘textile literacy’, that begins with ‘Learning to read fabric and design’ in girlhood before ‘writing with that fabric, constructing their own textile objects’, captures something of the complexity of Jane Morris’s relation to craft and creativity, domestic and professional embroidery, private and social practices (2009: 4, 8). Jane’s needlework is over-determined, weaving together as it were the craft practices of her husband’s philosophy with women’s domestic culture. As an accomplished needlewoman carrying out commissions for Morris and Co., as well as making and embellishing decorative objects and items of clothing for personal use or for friends and family, Jane Morris illustrates Kortsch’s contention that textile literacy became a form of feminine cultural capital in this period (2009: 13). Such ‘textile literacy’, we might say, played a vital role in the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 170

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

171

development of Morris designs and practices, such as through Jane’s discovery of the blue serge used in the daisy wall hangings for Red House, just as William and Jane’s own textile education through unpicking old embroidery to learn the means of their construction echoed girls’ training in garment construction through a similar process of unpicking (Kortsch 2009:8). As late as 1906, Jane Morris wrote to a friend, ‘I still embroider when there is any daylight’ (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 393), demonstrating the importance of this craft throughout her life. The examples discussed here may be modest attempts at creative agency or fragments of selfformation compared with the achievement of Morris and Co. tapestries or Burne-Jones canvases. Taken together, however, these examples of Jane’s handiwork offer a glimpse of Jane Morris as a creative subject, rather than merely an aesthetic object, and as such remind us that fostering (and inscribing) a creative life can take many forms. When Deborah Lutz recently observed the radical potential unleashed by ‘Making things among and with friends – with its sensuality, sympathy, and openhandedness’ in the Morris circle (2011: 168), she focused solely on homosocial relationships. Closer attention to Jane Morris’s role suggests that the intimacy arising from craft practices – the shared labour, tactility, and proximity – created an affective environment in which women and men participated. Beginning with the web of relationships at Red House, marked by varying degrees of intensity or love, and expressed through practices of creative labour and hospitality, the Morris home became a space where Jane Morris was free to develop creative agency through networks of relationship that supported and fostered that agency. Whether sewing in the drawing room, sharing designs and objects, or discussing the progress of projects in letters, social relationships were fostered and mediated by aesthetic practices within a community of artists and craftspeople in which the home played a central role as the site where such practices were first attempted, encouraged, or shared. If the range of accomplishments Jane Morris practised further erodes the myth of the languid and self-absorbed invalid, more importantly they establish her as an active participant in the ideals and aspirations of creativity that are more commonly and exclusively associated with William and May Morris.

Notes 1. Louis’ recent book (2009) on the relation between the mythic Persephone and literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, for instance, features Rossetti’s Proserpine (modelled by Jane Morris) on the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 171

18/03/2013 15:50

172

2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

Jane Morris cover. According to Surtees, Rossetti ‘was particularly fond’ of the painting Proserpine (vol. 1: 131). Rossetti’s representation of Jane as a melancholy Persephone figure was influenced by Swinburne’s poems ‘Hymn to Proserpine’ and ‘The Garden of Proserpine’ (1866) where the goddess is a deathly figure in a world without the consolation of religion. For more on the importance of Swinburne’s treatment of Proserpine for other writers in the period, see Radford (2007) and Louis (2009). The Persephone/Proserpine myth was, however, also taken up by women poets in the Victorian period as a means of critically interrogating assumptions about femininity, marriage and female intimacy by ‘restor[ing] subjectivity to a goddess who is given little or none in Swinburne, Meredith and Tennyson’ (Louis 2009: 73). Poets such as Jean Ingelow, in ‘Persephone’ (1862), and Dora Greenwell, a friend of Christina Rossetti’s, in ‘The Garden of Proserpina’ (1869), depicted marriage as a ‘fundamentally violent institution . . . that creates a bond between male and female at the expense of an original bond between mother and daughter’ (Louis 2009: xii). Later, Mathilde Blind, in ‘The New Proserpine’ (1895), continued this critique of male representations of the goddess. Marsh notes that Jane Morris did not attend her mother’s funeral in 1871 (2000: 95). In 1872, William Morris wrote to Aglaia Coronio during an absence of Jane and their daughters from home, describing his difficulty in being left alone with his sister-in-law: ‘she is quite harmless and even good and one ought not to be irritated with her but O my God what I have suffered from finding her always there at meals and the like!’ (25 November 1872; Kelvin vol.1, 1984: 172). A letter by May Morris in 1914 referred to ‘beautiful Mrs Stillman, Mother’s beloved friend’ (Londraville 1997: 155). According to Blunt, however, Marie Stillman had told him that William Morris ‘had a prejudice against her’ on account of ‘another Greek lady with whom Burne Jones had been in love [Marie Zambaco], this was her sister [in fact her cousin]’ and so Marie was seldom at Kelmscott in Morris’s company (FM, Secret Memoirs, vol. XIV: 288). Rowley was a regular summer guest at Kelmscott Manor in the 1890s: the Kelmscott Visitors’ Book recorded stays by Rowley in June 1893, September 1894 and August 1895 (BL, Add. 45412). Letters of William and Jane referred to it as backgammon and the use of dice would confirm this (in a letter to May Morris in November 1885, written when both parents were convalescing from illness, William wrote: ‘Hah! how the dice did rattle yesterday; your mother I regret to state got the best of it: I should say 40 games were played’; Kelvin vol. 2, 1987: 495, original emphasis). After her husband’s death, Jane wrote to Cockerell that she wanted to give away the ‘big old backgammon board . . . for I could never play on it more and I think none of us could’ (8 August 1897; V&A, MSL/1958/692/13: 26). For a more detailed account of the decoration of Red House, see Watkinson (1988), Marsh (2005) and Parkins (2010). Among the identifiable figures who modelled for images appearing on walls or furniture at Red House were Edward and Georgiana Burne-Jones,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 172

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

173

Elizabeth Siddall, Charles Faulkner, as well as William and Jane Morris. The Morrises’ wardrobe was made by Webb (who also designed other furniture and homewares for the house) and decorated by Burne-Jones; and a jewellery casket, jointly decorated by Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddall, was their wedding gift to Jane Morris (and remained in her bedroom throughout her life). Rossetti also painted panels on the drawing-room settle (adapted for Red House by Webb) while a mural fragment in the Morrises’ bedroom is usually attributed to Siddall. Walls, ceilings, and wall-hangings were decorated by the Rossettis, Morrises and Burne-Joneses, among others. Some of the Red House projects, however, remain incomplete, demonstrating the importance of process and spontaneity that characterised the work undertaken there. See Watkinson (1988), Marsh (2005) and Parkins (2010). Henderson, however, goes further in describing Jane Morris at Red House as ‘a regular tomboy’ (1967: 62), recounting an anecdote (without citation) of Morris being slapped from behind and saying ‘Don’t do it Janey!’ (1967: 63). To achieve the unique patterning on this ceiling, holes were pricked in wet plaster in order to enable the easier application of patterns in paint, as well as providing a template for future re-painting (Marsh 2005: 43). See Schaffer, for instance, on the popularity of Berlin-wool work as a handicraft for middle-class women from the 1840s onwards (2011: 42–4). She wrote to Webb in July 1871 thanking him for an ‘elaborate’ and ‘beautiful’ embroidery design he had sent. ‘I shall work it carefully in fine wool on blue serge I think, taking care to get different shades of blue for the flowers’, Jane informed him (John Branden-Jones Collection; 25 July 1871, WMG) Marsh, I think rightly, describes this comment as a ‘joke’ (2000: 31). See Ahmed’s phenomenological account of ‘affect as contact’ where she describes how we are moved by what we come into contact with (such as objects, bodies) (2006: 2). In D. W. Winnicott’s (1953) account, the ‘transitional object’ serves a vital role in the child’s transition from absolute dependence on the mother towards relative independence, through the adoption of a special object to which the child attaches significance and affection. Not only do transitional objects herald an important stage in the development of a child’s healthy autonomy but are also associated with the child’s entry into meaningful cultural traditions (see also Phillips 1988: 114–15). As Winnicott puts it: ‘sooner or later in an infant’s development there comes a tendency on the part of the infant to weave other-than-me objects into the personal pattern’ (1953: 231). The metaphor of weaving is an apt one in the context of the Morris household, as is Winnicott’s description of the types of objects that a child may adopt (and adapt) as a transitional object: ‘it must seem to the infant to give warmth, or move, or to have texture, or to do something that seems to show it has vitality or reality of its own’ (1953: 233 emphasis added). Note again the sensory emphasis in these recollections, as the child May ‘felt the loneliness’ ‘at the sight’ of the suffering Rossetti. Strangest of all May’s recollections concerning Rossetti is the story of

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 173

18/03/2013 15:50

174

Jane Morris Rossetti’s wish to adopt her, in which her mother is assigned a prominent, if equally bizarre, role: Anyway our mother told me a few years later, [Rossetti] had wanted to adopt me. It can be imagined how disconcerted mother was at the way I took this. Instead of flinging myself in her arms and exclaiming, “Dearest mother, never let us be parted!” or words to that effect, I turned seraphic eyes on her and asked, “Well, mother, why didn’t you? You’ve got Jenny.” I trust I have since made up to my mother for this painful moment of disillusionment! (vol. VIII, 1911: xxvi)

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

25.

Jane’s motive in disclosing this information to May is irretrievable and perhaps as baffling is May’s decision to include this anecdote in the Collected Works of her father in the first place. Can May really have had no sense of what might be inferred from this story about her desire to supplant her mother in Rossetti’s affections? Or of the rather disturbing blurring of familial relationships in this complexly oedipal configuration (a triangle does not begin to represent the conflicting dynamics involved as Rossetti substitutes for Morris, May for Jane, Jenny for May) that the story implied? For example, writing in the socialist newspaper, the Clarion, Edward Francis Fay observed of his visit to Kelmscott House in 1892: ‘I was immediately transported to the fifteenth century. Everything was mediaeval, and of sensibly solidity. No modern gew-gaws or gimcracks here; no veneer or unprofitable ornaments; everything wrought to the highest point of the usefully-artistic. No pretentious shams, no morbid decadent fancy – everything welcome, pleasing and serviceable’ (qtd in Pinkney 2005: 62–3). See also Marsh (1987) for a refutation of the charge that Jane Morris was emotionally uninvolved in the life of her daughters. According to Shaw, ‘The worst sorrow of [William Morris’s] life was when his daughter Jenny became a hopeless epileptic, and he knew that it was an inheritance from himself’ (1949: 7). Marsh’s observation that ‘It is less often remarked that the ‘Morris style’ of simple living was practised by the women, and owed a great deal to Janey’s preference for a plain and simple lifestyle at Kelmscott’ is a notable exception (2000: 145). The Kelmscott Visitors’ Book (BL, Add. 45412) seems reasonably complete for the years from 1896 to 1902. The book continues until 1904 but seems incomplete for 1903 and 1904 and entries in these latter years are mainly in Jane Morris’s hand rather than signed by guests, as in previous years. In a letter to Blunt in July 1890 Jane wrote: ‘Mrs de Morgan and her daughter are with us now [at Kelmscott Manor], both great friends of mine’ (Faulkner 1986: 45). According to the Kelmscott Visitors’ Book, Mary de Morgan stayed for visits in 1890, 1892, 1893, 1894, 1895, 1898, 1899 and 1900. In 1901 and 1902, she stayed with Jane twice a year there (BL, Add. 45412). For Shaw’s unflattering view of Mary de Morgan, see Shaw (1936: xxv–xxvi). In 1897, Jane Morris wrote that she ‘had long believed in the transmigration of souls’ (Sharp and Marsh 2012: 298) and the De Morgan family had a long association with spiritualism; Mary’s mother, Sophia, for instance,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 174

18/03/2013 15:50

Home

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

175

wrote a well-known book, From Matter to Spirit: A Record of Ten Year’s Experience in Spirit Manifestations (1863). (In a letter in 1890, Jane Morris described Sophia De Morgan with warm affection while also noting she had ‘the wildest theories about various subjects’; Faulkner 1986: 44.) Jane had also attended séances with Dante Gabriel Rossetti as early as 1868 and Rossetti reported that at one of these evenings Jane had seen a ‘mysterious light’ (Fredeman vol. IV, 2004: 50, 54). See also William Michael Rossetti’s Séance Diaries (BodL), a bizarre resource that not only reminds us of the widespread interest in such matters by the Victorians but the ambivalent attitude towards spiritualism that such involvement could signify. In 1881, Jane had asked Rossetti to give her Marie’s address in Florence: ‘Will you give me Mary Stillman’s address? I should like to call on her and see her happy face in her Florentine home’ (Bryson 1976: 175). Subsequent letters from this trip addressed to Jane at the Stillmans indicate her stay there. The Kelmscott Visitors’ Book recorded visits by Marie Spartali Stillman in 1893, 1897, 1898, 1902 and 1904 (BL, Add. 45412). Spartali Stillman is known to have painted at least eight pictures of Kelmscott from a variety of perspectives of the house (see Parry 2007: 169). See, for instance, Helen Nussey and Olive Cockerell, A French Garden in England (1909). See also Ruskin’s letter to S. C. Cockerell about Olive in Meynell (1940: 47). Olive Cockerell had illustrated Mary de Morgan’s The Wind Fairies (1900). It is interesting that Lucy Crane here articulates an individualist view so at odds with William Morris’s defence of the ‘lesser arts’ when the Cranes, closely associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, were both also in sympathy with Morris’s socialism (Walter joined the Hammersmith Socialist Society in 1890). After experience gained as a needleworker for the Firm, Bessie Burden was employed at the School of Art Needlework, established in Kensington in 1872. See, for instance, Kelvin (vol. 1, 1984: 420) where William consulted Jane concerning payment and other arrangements made with needleworkers employed by the Firm. See also Marsh (2000: 114–17). The 6th Arts and Crafts exhibition opened at the New Gallery in October 1899 and included a William Morris retrospective. All the Morris women – Jane, Jenny and May – had worked on items displayed there. The first book (BL, 45351A) is bound in red leather stamped with gold and the paper is watermarked 1889 (although a paper insert, which includes the monogram ‘JM’ within an outline that may represent a pansy, is inscribed with the date ‘Christmas 1885’). Tidcombe speculates this book was intended as a gift for one of Jane’s daughters (1996: 194). The inclusion of a French poem in the ‘Christmas 1885’ insert that was also copied into the green velvet bound book suggests that the two books were meant for different recipients. I wonder, however, if Blunt was the intended recipient, even if the gift was never bestowed (the book also seems incomplete)? The inclusion of the pansy motif, associated with Rossetti (see Chapter 1), would signal an association dear to Blunt that always resonated in the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 175

18/03/2013 15:50

176

35. 36. 37. 38.

Jane Morris Jane-Wilfrid relationship. The second and simplest book (BL, 45351B), bound in green velvet, includes the initials ‘JM’ on the inside cover and contains many Christmas-related excerpts, suggesting it was intended as a Christmas gift. The third (BL, 45351C), bound in vellum with blue silk end-papers, contains an alphabet of quotations from a wide range of verse sources, including nursery rhymes. The previous month, Jane had written to Blunt concerning the establishment of the press: ‘We shall call the press the “Kelmscott Press”’ (Faulkner 1986: 50). The Kelmscott Visitors’ Book recorded a visit by Mary de Morgan in August 1895 as ‘Professional visit to continue bed-quilt’ (BL, Add. 45412). I am grateful to Julia Winckler for drawing my attention to the potential significance of the conditionality of Morris’s motto. Marsh has recently questioned the veracity of this anecdote (2010: 59–60) but the prevalence of the motto and the scale of the design work undertaken at Red House suggest that there would have been ample opportunities for such defacing of works in progress.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 176

18/03/2013 15:50

Conclusion

any text depends upon the absence of the bodies and voices that it represents. Greenblatt (2000: 31)

By the time Jane Morris wrote the letter in 1904 in which she asked, ‘Why should there be any special record of me when I have never done any special work?’ (Faulkner 1986: 121), the Pre-Raphaelite biography industry was well underway; in fact, her question occurred in the context of a discussion of the merits of Georgiana Burne-Jones’ recentlypublished Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones. While, on one level, Jane’s question could seem to signal her acceptance of the gendered division of labour and status associated with the men and women, artists and models, in Pre-Raphaelite circles, her praise for Georgiana’s efforts clearly accept published authorship as a legitimate activity for women. Despite her demurral concerning her own ‘special work’, however, Jane Morris returned to the subject in another letter to Blunt a few years later, while commiserating about his state of health: You give but a doleful picture of yourself. I know too well these windings up of life are not very cheerful, if one could just drop off quietly like Autumn leaves, it would be so pleasant for everybody. I am in a worse plight than most, having no special work and constant ill:health. I have been thinking of writing a little book of reminiscences (not for publication) but just to beguile the weary hours – and shall ask you once more for the ‘Letters’ I once committed to your care. (Faulkner 1986: 130)

Jane Morris’s tone here may seem to confirm some of the attributes commonly associated with her (such as melancholy invalidism) but what is particularly intriguing in this correspondence about correspondence is the link drawn between the absence of ‘special work’ and the (desired) presence of letters that would potentially enable the writing of her

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 177

18/03/2013 15:50

178

Jane Morris

reminiscences. Jane is here referring to the package of love letters from Rossetti that she had entrusted to Blunt as a symbol of their intimacy and in recognition of the affinity that Blunt felt for Rossetti (discussed in Chapter 1). Her request for the return of these letters suggests that they would be significant for any reminiscences that eventuated, with an intended focus on private experience (‘not for publication’) rather than public worth or achievement. Did she envisage a confessional narrative, akin to the eighteenth-century ‘scandalous memoir’ in which a woman’s life was constructed in relation to her transgressive relationship with a culturally significant man (Peterson 1999: 28)?1 If so, would this suggest that she saw the ‘special work’ of her life to derive from her liaison with Rossetti? Or did the proposed act of writing itself constitute ‘special work’, providing a sense of purpose or occupation in her ‘Autumn’ years? The form such reminiscences would take, or the purpose they would have served, remain unknown. Indeed, we do not even know whether Jane Morris ever intended to undertake such a memorialising project at all: it cannot be ruled out that her statement was more a ruse to persuade Blunt to return her letters when earlier requests had failed (‘shall ask you once more’). Even though Jane wrote to Blunt the following month (14 January 1909) confirming that the ‘packet’ of letters had arrived and assuring him ‘I will let you know how I go on’, there is no record that any reminiscences were written.2 The larger question of whether Jane Morris’s life warranted memorialisation has remained unresolved in our own time. In his Foreword to Peter Faulkner’s Morris Society lecture on Blunt and the Morrises in 1981, Ray Watkinson struggled with the issue of public revelation of private histories: whatever delicacy we may feel about opening up the intimacies of dead men and women in whom our interest has been engaged by what they did and believed, we all know that the tenderest and most shameful or private record – poems, letters, notes and diaries – will be exhumed, examined, edited, published, whatever their writers may have wished or meant or feared. If then such material is to be raked over, it is better that it be done by those who love and respect those whose privacy is thus willy nilly to be exposed, and done in such a way as to promote sympathy and understanding of all the parties involved. Access to such private papers may well serve scholarship, which is as greedy and shameless as journalism; but in the end the only justification for such researches, such publication, is that we – all – learn thereby to know better not only the dead but ourselves, enlarging not just knowledge but humane understanding. (1981: 5–6)

Watkinson’s concerns about the ethics of exposing ‘the intimacies of dead men and women’ are expressed in notably feeling terms that eschew the myth of scholarly objectivity: such scholarship, he urges, should be

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 178

18/03/2013 15:50

Conclusion

179

undertaken by those who ‘love and respect’ the objects of their research even though, he fears, the drive for knowledge may ultimately be as ‘greedy and shameless as journalism’. Watkinson’s comments bear out what Cora Kaplan has described as ‘the high degree of affect involved in reading and writing about the Victorian past’ (2007: 5), arguably nowhere more apparent than in texts relating to the Pre-Raphaelites where the loves and lives of artists and models seem just as captivating as the vivid canvases they produced. Implicit in Watkinson’s reservations about research into ‘private histories’ through access to private papers is a fear of what we might (inelegantly) call the ‘tabloidisation’ of scholarship or biography, where tabloid journalism’s preoccupation with scandal meets the narrative conventions of soap opera (resulting in outcomes like Desperate Romantics (2010), the BBC’s rollicking version of Pre-Raphaelites in love, marred by historical howlers and clichéd characterisations). Throughout this book, I have shown how private papers – or the ‘tenderest and most shameful or private record’ – have so often been interpreted primarily through conventional assumptions about gender, sexuality, class or art. The paradox of Jane Morris is that despite her continuing cultural visibility and the relatively recent exposure of her scandalous liaisons she has remained a rather two-dimensional figure with the same paradigm of traits, conveyed through the same recycled anecdotes, firmly in place. The burden of history, which has rendered her as either tragic or knowing siren, has failed to capture the agency or complexity of a creative, socially-mobile, and extraordinary Victorian woman. In her recent book Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007), Kaplan described our seemingly irrepressible desire to possess the Victorian past and our fascination with Victorian sexuality. In the figure of Jane Morris, these two elements have powerfully combined to produce an enduring myth. Her artistic representation – which continues to grace book covers, calendars and other merchandise – is often deployed to symbolise the uncanny appeal of Victorian sexuality to jaded, twenty-first century subjects and to figure an exotic femininity that evokes a lost but alluring past. Despite her iconic status, however, Jane Morris has received little acknowledgement for constructing a distinctive identity associated with a unique amalgam of unconventional beauty and idiosyncratic dress. Instead, her striking beauty and avantgardist style have been credited to Rossetti, just as her character has been inferred from his canvases. The image of Jane Morris that has prevailed has too often airbrushed out the messiness, complexity, or cognitive dissonance of a life narrative that encompassed the contradictions of her time.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 179

18/03/2013 15:50

180

Jane Morris

In questioning the ‘calendar girl’ myth of Jane Morris, I have drawn attention to some of the material objects most associated with Jane Morris because they are powerful reminders of that which eludes us whenever we try to reconstruct the past, reminders of the provisionality of the narratives and re-interpretations we can offer. Such objects – perhaps, in the weight of their materiality, the true burden of history – ‘testify in their stubborn otherness of the previous existence of a world that is more than the product of our current imagination’ (Belsey 1999: 12). Artefacts – whether aesthetic (a dress, a work of embroidery) or textual (in the form of letters, diaries or published books) – may allow us to trace past meanings, even as they force us to acknowledge our distance from the past (Belsey 1999: 2). Such objects, however, require interpretation: despite their materiality or seeming permanence, they do not embody the past in the sense that their meaning is inherent or unchanging. At most, they may point us indexically to the historical subject who made them, or gesture to the context in which they were produced. For me, the most resonant objects associated with Jane Morris are the Kelmscott bed coverlet and the handmade books. To see (or handle) such objects is, in one way, to be brought closer to the process of their production: to see the variations in stitching and the wear that testifies to the passage of time, or the delicate cross-hatching in black ink that frames a page of transcribed quotations, is to gain a new awareness of the historical agent – the woman – who designed and worked these objects, who devoted time and skill to the production of something for herself or for others. In another way, of course, the ‘thingness’ of these objects confronts us with the absence of the self who made them, and with the opacity of her aims and intentions. Was she pleased with the result? Do these objects testify to success, or failure? As gifts, do they mark a gesture of intimacy? Or were they compensating for a lack of (proper) feeling? Did the labour on these objects consume otherwise empty time or fill it with satisfying creativity? To ask such questions of these objects is to heighten our awareness of the limits of what we know or can discern about past lives and to thus challenge the ‘falsely obvious’ certitudes that are crucial to the perpetuation of myth (Barthes 1970: 128). In a similar vein, Carolyn Steedman has argued that writing history requires us to be conscious of the provisionality of our project: The practice of historical inquiry and historical writing is a recognition of temporariness and impermanence, and in this way is a quite different literary form from that of the life story . . . which presents momentarily a completeness, a completeness which lies in the figure of the writer or the teller, in the

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 180

18/03/2013 15:50

Conclusion

181

here and now, saying: that’s how it was; or, that’s how I believe it to have been. At the centre of the written history, on the other hand, lies some kind of recognition of temporariness and impermanence. (1992: 49)

This book has resisted pronouncing ‘that’s how it was’ and refused the possibility of ‘completeness’ in the account of its central figure. Ultimately, it is not a life story but a provisional history, not least because it is always possible some new information – new documents or artefacts – may emerge that will alter what we know about Jane Morris, opening up new interpretations of her life. As a history of representations, this book is premised on the assumption that texts, whether self-authored or written by others, can only offer us a mediated representation of Jane Morris. Neither has it been my project to restore a voice to Jane Morris. Speaking for another is always an ethically fraught undertaking and, as Alison Chapman has astutely noted, projecting a voice onto historically silenced women may be ‘an act of critical ventriloquy’ that merely replicates what it seeks to overturn (2000: 36). Accounts of Jane Morris as a sullen muse or silent invalid have objectified a historical subject as a body out of place, a working-class woman transformed by marriage into a different subject position that she can only imperfectly occupy so that she remains an anomaly, a medieval woman in the nineteenth century, playing at invalidism – or gentility, or creativity – and disoriented by the world in which she finds herself. In the letters of Jane Morris, however, glimpses of a rather different selfunderstanding emerge, of a woman with a high degree of self-awareness of the ambiguities in her position. I have applied Bourdieu’s concept of habitus to try to capture the sense in which social structures such as class, gender and ethnicity, in conjunction with specific material environments and locations, shape both our internal sense of self and our capacity to act meaningfully in the world through bodies (our own and others) and the material objects that come to hand. In challenging the myth that Jane Morris was a passive vessel, or a blank – if exotic – screen on which the male artist could project his fantasies and desires, it has seemed to me that we need to re-think the life narrative of a woman like Jane Morris with more complex conceptual tools to imagine how a life develops or is transformed through touch as well as thought, intimacy as well as action, and how encounters with radically new contexts can re-make selves in creative, traumatic or satisfying ways.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 181

18/03/2013 15:50

182

Jane Morris

Notes 1. Peterson contrasts this form with that of the nineteenth-century woman’s memoir, ‘domestic in its focus, relational in its mode of self-construction’, allowing women ‘to represent their lives in terms of “good” feminine plots’ (1999: 20). 2. Her letters to a range of correspondents in the first half of 1909 described a prolonged period of ill health, with her daughter Jenny also poorly (‘Her case is hopeless’, Jane wrote despairingly to Blunt in May; WSRO) so this circumstance alone could account for the planned reminiscences never eventuating.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 182

18/03/2013 15:50

Bibliography

Archival Sources (with abbreviations used in the text in brackets) Angeli-Dennis Papers, University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver (AD). Blunt Papers, British Library, London (BL). Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (FM). Blunt Papers, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester (WSRO). Castle Howard Archives, York (CH). Cobden Papers, British Library, London (CP). Cockerell Papers, British Library, London (BL). Cockerell Papers, National Art Library, Victoria & Albert Museum, London (V&A). Dante Gabriel Rossetti Collection, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (DGRC). Hammersmith & Fulham Archives, London (H&F). H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, USA (HD). John Brandon Jones Collection, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London (WMG). Mackail Notebooks, William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London (WMG). Norton Family Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University (NFP). Penkill Papers, University of British Columbia Library, Vancouver (PP). Photography Collection, National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG). Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Notebook 1871–1881, Ashley, British Library, London (BL, Ashley). Rossetti, William Michael, Séance Diaries, Bodleian Library, Oxford (BodL). William Morris Papers, British Library, London (BL).

Published Sources Ahmed, Sara (2006), Queer Phenomenology, Durham: Duke University Press. Altick, Richard (1957), The English Common Reader, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Amigoni, David (2006), ‘Introduction: Victorian Life Writing: Genres, Print,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 183

18/03/2013 15:50

184

Jane Morris

Constituencies’, in David Amigoni (ed.), Life Writing and Victorian Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–20. Anderson, Anne (2001), ‘Life into Art and Art into Life: Visualising the Aesthetic Woman or “High Art Maiden” of the Victorian “Renaissance”’, Women’s History Review, 10.3: 441–62. Angeli, Helen Rossetti (1949), Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies, London: Hamish Hamilton. Anonymous (1883), ‘The Linnell and Rossetti Pictures at Burlington House’, London Society, vol. XLIII: 217–21. Bailin, Miriam (1994), The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of Being Ill, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, Roland [1957] (1970), Mythologies, London: Paladin. Beizer, Janet (2009), Thinking Through the Mothers: Reimagining Women’s Biographies, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Belsey, Catherine (1999), Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Belsey, Catherine (2001), ‘Denaturalizing the Family: History at the Level of the Signifier’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 4.3: 289–303. Bending, Lucy (2000), The Representation of Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture, Oxford: Clarendon. Bennett, Tony (2007), ‘Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu’, New Literary History, 38.1: 201–28. Benson, Arthur C. (1904), Rossetti, London: Macmillan. Bingaman, Amy (2000), ‘The business of brotherhood: Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company and the Pre-Raphaelite culture of youth’, in Laura Morowitz and William Vaughan (eds), Artistic Brotherhoods in the Nineteenth Century, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 82–104. Bingaman, Amy (2005), The Embodiment of Dreams: Portraiture and the PreRaphaelite Search for the Ideal, unpub. diss., University of Chicago. Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen (1919), My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914, 2 vols, London: Secker. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie (1996), The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bodenheimer, Rosemarie (2007), Knowing Dickens, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Bornand, Odette (ed.) (1977), The Diary of W. M. Rossetti, 1870–1873, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1990), The Logic of Practice, Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (1997), Pascalian Meditations, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bourdieu, Pierre (2002), ‘Habitus’, in Jean Hillier and Emma Rooksby (eds), Habitus: A Sense of Place, Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 27–34. Briggs, R. C. H. (1964), ‘Letters to Janey’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 1.4: 2–22. Bronfen, Elisabeth (1992), ‘Disavowal’, in Elizabeth Wright (ed.), Feminism and Psychoanalysis: A Critical Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 70–1. Broughton, Trev (2000), ‘Auto/biography and the actual course of things’, in Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts, theories, methods, London: Routledge, pp. 241–6.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 184

18/03/2013 15:50

Bibliography

185

Brown, Bill (2003), A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bryson, John (ed.) (1976), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Buchanan, Robert [1871] (1997), ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti (1871)’, in Carolyn Hares-Stryker (ed.), An Anthology of PreRaphaelite Writings, Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, pp. 237–47. Bullen, J. B. (2011), Rossetti: Painter and Poet, London: Frances Lincoln. Burne-Jones, Georgiana (1904), Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Volume I, 1833–1867, London: Macmillan. Caine, T. Hall (1882), Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London: Elliot Stock. Caine, T. Hall (1928), Recollections of Rossetti, London: Cassell and Company. Casteras, Susan P. (1990), English Pre-Raphaelitism and Its Reception in America, Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Casteras, Susan P. (1992), ‘Pre-Raphaelite Challenges to Victorian Canons of Beauty’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55.1: 13–35. Chapman, Alison (2000), The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Charteris, Evan (1931), The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse, London: William Heinemann. Chatman, Seymour (1978), Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Cherry, Deborah (2009), ‘In a word: Pre-Raphaelite, Pre-Raphaelites, Pre-Raphaelitism’, in Michaela Gielbelhausen and Tim Barringer (eds), Writing the Pre-Raphaelites: Text, Context, Subtext, Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 17–51. Cherry, Deborah and Griselda Pollock (1984), ‘Woman as Sign in PreRaphaelite Literature: A Study of the Representation of Elizabeth Siddall’, Art History, 7.2 (June): 206–27. Clewell, Tammy (2004), ‘Mourning Beyond Melancholia: Freud’s Psychoanalysis of Loss’, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 52.1: 43–67. Cline, C. L. (ed.) (1978), The Owl and the Rossettis: Letters of Charles A. Howell and Dante Gabriel, Christina, and William Michael Rossetti, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas (1969), The Journals of Thomas James CobdenSanderson 1879–1922, vol. 1, New York: Burt Franklin. Cockerell, Sydney (1951), ‘Rossetti and Mrs Morris’, Times Literary Supplement, (24 August): 533. Codell, Julie F. (2003), The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, 1870–1910, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohan, Steven and Linda M. Shires (1988), Telling Stories: A Theoretical Analysis of Narrative Fiction, New York: Routledge. Cohen, William A. (1996), Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction, Durham: Duke University Press. Colby, Vineta (2003), Vernon Lee: A Literary Biography, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Colclough, Stephen (1998), ‘Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience’, Publishing History 44: 5–37.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 185

18/03/2013 15:50

186

Jane Morris

Colebrook, Claire (1997), New Literary Histories: New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cox, David (1974), ‘Edmund New’s “Diary of a visit to Kelmscott Manor House”’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 3.1: 3–7. Crane, Lucy [1882] (1886), Art and the Formation of Taste: Six Lectures, Boston: Chautauqua Press. Crossley, Nick (2001), ‘The Phenomenological Habitus and its Construction’, Theory and Society, 30.1: 81–120. Crow, Gerald H. (1934), William Morris Designer, London: The Studio. Doughty, Oswald (1949), A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London: Frederick Muller Ltd. Doughty, Oswald and John Robert Wahl (eds) (1965), Letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Volume 1 1835–1860, Oxford: Clarendon. Dunn, Henry Treffry (1904), Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and His Circle, ed. Gale Pedrick, London: Elkin Mathews. Dunstan, Angela (2010), ‘“I am plain Morris”: Re-imagining the Everyday William Morris in H. D.’s White Rose and the Red’, in Wendy Parkins (ed.), William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, pp. 155–74. Egremont, Max (1977), The Cousins: The friendship, opinions and activities of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and George Wyndham, London: Collins. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English (1973), Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness, Old Westbury: The Feminist Press. Ellis, Sarah Stickney (1843), The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Habits, New York: Appleton & Co. Ellmann, Richard (1988), Oscar Wilde, New York: Knopf. Faulkner, Peter (ed.) (1986), Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt together with Extracts from Blunt’s Diaries, Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Felski, Rita (2000), ‘Nothing to Declare: Identity, Shame, and the Lower Middle Class’, in Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture, New York: New York University Press, pp. 33–54. Fleming, Margaret (1981), ‘Where Janey Used to Live’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 4.4: 2–17. Fogarty, Robert S. (1990), All Things New: American Communes and Utopian Movements, 1860–1914, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ford, Colin (2004), ‘A Pre-Raphaelite Partnership: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Robert Parsons’, Burlington Magazine, 146 (1214): 308–18. Forman, H. Buxton (1914), ‘Letter: Mrs. William Morris’, The Athenaeum, 7 February: 203. Fowler, Bridget (1997), Pierre Bourdieu and Cultural Theory: Critical Investigations, London: Sage. Fox, Pamela (1994), Class Fictions: Shame and Resistance in the British Working-Class Novel, 1890–1945, Durham: Duke University Press. Francillon, R. E. (1914), Mid-Victorian Memories, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Frawley, Maria (2004), Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fredeman, William E. (1965), ‘Rossetti’s In Memoriam: An Elegiac Reading of The House of Life’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 47: 298–341.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 186

18/03/2013 15:50

Bibliography

187

Fredeman, William E. (1970–1), ‘Prelude to the Last Decade: Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the Summer of 1872’, Parts I and II, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 53: 75–121, 272–321. Fredeman, William E. (ed.) (2002–10), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 9 vols, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Fredeman, William E. (2003), ‘The Great Pre-Raphaelite Paper Chase: A Retrospective’, in David Latham (ed.), Haunted Texts: Studies in PreRaphaelitism, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp. 211–36. Freedgood, Elaine (2010), The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Freud, Sigmund (1925), ‘Negation,’ in James Strachey (ed.), Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, London: Hogarth, pp. 235–9. Gagnier, Regenia (1986), Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gagnier, Regenia (1991), Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, Catherine (2000), ‘Counterhistory and the Anecdote’, in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 49–74. Gaunt, William (1942), The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy, London: Jonathan Cape. Gay, Peter (1995), The Naked Heart: The Bourgeois Experience from Victoria to Freud, vol. 4, New York: Norton. Gere, Charlotte (1996), ‘The Art of Dress, Victorian Artists and Aesthetic Style’, in Simply Stunning: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Dressing, Cheltenham: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, pp. 13–24. Giddens, Anthony (1986), The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration, University of California Press. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar (1979), The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, New Haven: Yale University Press. Glaiser, J. Bruce (1921), William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, London: Longmans Green & Co. Goldsmith, Jason (2009), ‘Celebrity and the spectacle of nation’, in Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 21–40. Greenblatt, Stephen (1991), ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 42–56. Greenblatt, Stephen (2000), ‘The Touch of the Real’, in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 20–48. Grieve, A. I. (1973), ‘Rossetti’s Applied Art Designs: 2. Book Bindings’, Burlington Magazine, 115 (February): 79–83. Grylls, Rosalie Glynn (1964a), Portrait of Rossetti, London: Macdonald. Grylls, Rosalie Glynn (1964b), ‘The Reserved Rossetti Letters’, Times Literary Supplement (30 January): 96. Hake, T. G. (1892), Memoirs of Eighty Years, London: Richard Bentley & Sons. Hannay, David (1883), ‘The Paintings of Mr Rossetti’, National Review, 1.1 (March): 126–34.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 187

18/03/2013 15:50

188

Jane Morris

Harvey, Charles and Jon Press (1991), William Morris: Design and Enterprise in Victorian Britain, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hawksley, Lucinda (2004), Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, London: André Deutsch. Henderson, Philip (1967), William Morris: His Life Work and Friends, London: Thames and Hudson. Hindson, Catherine (2011), ‘“Mrs Langtry Seems to Be on the Way to a Fortune”: The Jersey Lily and Models of Late Nineteenth-Century Fame’, in Su Holmes and Diana Negra (eds), In the Limelight and Under the Microscope: Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity, New York: Continuum, pp. 17–35. Holloway, Mark (1951), Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America 1680–1880, London: Turnstile Press. Holmes, Richard (1995), ‘Biography: Inventing the Truth’, in John Batchelor (ed.), The Art of Literary Biography, Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 15–25. Horner, Frances (1933), Time Remembered, London: William Heinemann. Hunt, Violet (1932), The Wife of Rossetti: Her Life and Death, New York: Dutton. Jolly, Margaretta (2009), ‘On Burning, Saving and Stealing Letters’, New Formations, 67 (Summer): 25–34. Kaplan, Cora (2007), Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism, New York: Columbia University Press. Kelvin, Norman (1984–96), The Collected Letters of William Morris, 4 vols, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kelvin, Norman (1999), Letters as Biography and Autobiography: Morris’s Letters to Jane and Jenny Morris, 1996 Kelmscott Lecture, Hammersmith: William Morris Society. Knight, Joseph (1887), Life of D. G. Rossetti, London: W. Scott. Kortsch, Christine Bayles (2009), Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women’s Fiction: Literacy, Textiles and Activism, Farnham: Ashgate. Lawler, Steph (1999), ‘“Getting Out and Getting Away”: Women’s Narratives of Class Mobility’, Feminist Review, 63 (Autumn): 3–24. Lawson, Andrew (1965), ‘Maid for Morris,’ Isis (11 November): 15–16. Le Gallienne, Richard (1925), The Romantic ’90s, Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Co. Ledbetter, Kathryn (1996), ‘“BeGemmed and beAmuletted”: Tennyson and Those “Vapid” Gift Books,’ Victorian Poetry 34.2: 235–45. Lee, Vernon (1884), Miss Brown, Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press. Lewis, Roger C. (2006), ‘Appendix 1: Rossetti’s Relations with the Morrises 1868–1875’, in William E. Fredeman (ed.), The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, vol. VI, pp. 583–7. Light, Alison (2007), Mrs Woolf and the Servants, London: Penguin. Lindsay, Jack (1975), William Morris: His Life and Work, London: Constable & Co. Logan, Thad (2001), The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Londraville, Janis (1997), On Poetry, Painting, and Politics: The Letters of May Morris and John Quinn, Selingsgrove: Susquehanna University Press; London: Associated University Presses.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 188

18/03/2013 15:50

Bibliography

189

Longford, Elizabeth (1979), A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, London: Tauris Parke. Louis, Margot K. (2009), Persephone Rises, 1860–1927: Mythography, Gender, and the Creation of a New Spirituality, Farnham: Ashgate. Lubbock, Percy (ed.) (1920), The Letters of Henry James, New York: Scribner. Lutz, Deborah (2011), Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism, New York: Norton. Lyon, Janet (2009), ‘Sociability in the Metropole: Modernism’s Bohemian Salons’, ELH 76 (3): 687–711. MacCarthy, Fiona (1994), William Morris: A Life for Our Time, London: Faber & Faber. Mackail, J. W. (1899), The Life of William Morris, 2 vols, London: Green & Co. Mancoff, Debra N. (2000), Jane Morris: The Pre-Raphaelite Model of Beauty, Rohnert Park, CA: Pomegranate. Marillier, H. C. [1899] (1904), Dante Gabriel Rossetti: An Illustrated Memorial of his Art and Life, Third Edition, London: George Bell & Sons. Marsh, Jan (1985), Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, London: Quartet Books. Marsh, Jan (1987), ‘The Defence of Janey’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 7.3: 18–22. Marsh, Jan (1999), Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Marsh, Jan [1986] (2000), Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story, 1839–1938, Horsham: The Printed Word. Marsh, Jan (2005), William Morris & Red House, London: National Trust Books. Marsh, Jan (2010), ‘Red House: Past and Future’, in Phillippa Bennett and Rosie Miles (eds), William Morris in the Twenty-First Century, Bern: Peter Lang, pp. 53–70. Maynes, Mary Jo, Jennifer L. Pierce and Barbara Laslett (2008), Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Mays, Kelly J. (2008), ‘Domestic Spaces, Readerly Acts: Reading(,) Gender, and Class in Working-Class Autobiography’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 30.4: 343–68. McDougall, Joyce (1989), Theatres of the Body: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Psychosomatic Illness, London: Free Association Books. McGann, Jerome (2000), Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game that Must be Lost, New Haven: Yale University Press. McNay, Lois (1999), ‘Gender, Habitus and the Field: Pierre Bourdieu and the Limits of Reflexivity’, Theory, Culture & Society, 16.1: 95–117. Meynell, Esther (1947), Portrait of William Morris, London: Chapman & Hall. Meynell, Viola (ed.) (1940), Friends of a Lifetime: Letters to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, London: Jonathan Cape. Miles, Andrew (1999), Social Mobility in Nineteenth- and Early TwentiethCentury England, New York: St Martin’s Press. Mills, Ernestine (ed.) (1912), The Life and Letters of Frederic Shields 1833–1911, London: Longmans. Mitchell, Rebecca N. (2010), ‘Acute Chinamania: Pathologizing Aesthetic Dress’, Fashion Theory, 14.1: 45–64.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 189

18/03/2013 15:50

190

Jane Morris

Moi, Toril (1999), What is a Woman? And Other Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moi, Toril (2000), ‘Is Anatomy Destiny? Freud and Biological Determinism’, in Peter Brooks and Alex Woloch (eds), Whose Freud? The Place of Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 71–92. Mole, Tom (2007), Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Mole, Tom (ed.) (2009), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montrose, Louis (1989), ‘Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture’, in H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism, New York: Routledge, pp. 15–36. Morris, James M. and Andrea L. Kross (2004), The A to Z of Utopianism, Lanham: Scarecrow Press. Morris, May (ed.) (1910–1915), Collected Works of William Morris, 24 vols, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Morris, May (1919), letter, Times Literary Supplement, (22 May): 280. Morris, May (1931), The Introductions to the Collected Works of William Morris, 2 vols, New York: Oriole. Morris, May (1934), letter, Times Literary Supplement, (17 May): 360. Morris, William (1880), ‘The Beauty of Life [1880]’, Collected Works, vol. XXII, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Morris, William (1884), ‘Useless Work Versus Useless Toil [1884]’, Collected Works, vol. XXIII, London: Longmans, Green & Co. Murphy, William M. (1995), Family Secrets: William Butler Yeats and His Relatives, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Noble, Greg and Megan Watkins (2003), ‘So, How Did Bourdieu Learn to Play Tennis? Habitus, Consciousness and Habituation’, Cultural Studies, 17.3–4: 520–39. Nord, Deborah Epstein (2006), Gypsies and the British Imagination 1807–1930, New York: Columbia University Press. Novak, Daniel E. (2008), ‘Sexuality in the Age of Technological Reproducibility: Oscar Wilde, Photography, and Identity’, in Joseph Bristow (ed.), Oscar Wilde and Modern Culture, Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 63–95. Nussbaum, Felicity A. (1988), ‘Eighteenth-Century Women’s Autobiographical Commonplaces’, in Shari Benstock (ed.), The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, London: Routledge, pp. 147–72. Nussey, Helen and Olive Cockerell (1909), A French Garden in England, London: Stead’s. Oppenheim, Janet (1991), Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England, New York: Oxford University Press. Ormond, Leonée (1970), ‘Vernon Lee as a Critic of Aestheticism in Miss Brown’, Colby Library Quarterly 9 (September): 131–54 Ormond, Leonée (1974), ‘Dress in the Painting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Costume, 8: 26–9. Pal-Lapinski, Piya (2005), The Exotic Woman in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction and Culture: A Reconsideration, Durham, NH: University of New Hampshire Press.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 190

18/03/2013 15:50

Bibliography

191

Parkins, Wendy (2007), ‘“That Venturesome Woman”: The Italian Travels of Jane Morris’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 16 (Fall): 66–87. Parkins, Wendy (2008), ‘Jane Morris’s Invalidism Reconsidered’, NineteenthCentury Gender Studies, 4.2 Parkins, Wendy (2010), ‘Feeling at Home: Gender and Creative Agency at Red House’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 15.1: 61–81. Parry, Linda (2007), ‘The Morris Family and Kelmscott,’ in Alan Crossley, Tom Hassall and Peter Salway (eds), William Morris’s Kelmscott: Landscape and History, Bollington: Windgather Press, pp. 94–109. Pedrick, Gale (1964), Life with Rossetti: or No Peacocks Allowed, London: Macdonald. Pennell, E. R and J. Pennell (1920), The Life of James McNeill Whistler, 6th Revised Edition, London: William Heinemann. Peterson, Linda H. (1999), Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Peterson, William S. (1991), The Kelmscott Press: A History of William Morris’s Typographical Adventure, Oxford: Clarendon. Phillips, Adam (1988), Winnicott, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pieri, Giovanna (2004), ‘The Critical Reception of Pre-Raphaelitism in Italy, 1878–1910’, Modern Language Review, 99.2: 364–81. Pieri, Giovanna (2007), The Influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on Fin-de-Siècle Italy: Art, Beauty and Culture, London: Maney Publishing. Pinkney, Tony (ed.) (2005), We Met Morris: Interviews with William Morris, 1885–96, London: Spire Books/William Morris Society. Plotz, John (2008), Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Poovey, Mary (1989), Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, London: Virago. Preston, Kerrison (ed.) (1953), Letters from Graham Robertson, London: Hamish Hamilton. Prettejohn, Elizabeth (2006), ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Model’, in Jane Desmarais, Martin Postle and William Vaughan (eds), Model and Supermodel: The Artist’s Model in British Art and Culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 26–46. Price, Lorraine (1983–4), ‘Cormell Price, Esq.’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 5: 30–9. Prinsep, Val C. (1904a), ‘A Chapter from a Painter’s Reminiscences. The Oxford Circle: Rossetti, Burne-Jones and William Morris’, Magazine of Art 2 (January): 167–72. Prinsep, Val C. (1904b), ‘A Chapter from a Painter’s Reminiscences. Part II. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’, Magazine of Art 2 (January): 281–5. Probyn, Elspeth (2004), ‘Shame in the Habitus’, Sociological Review, 52.2: 224–48. Psomiades, Kathy Alexis (1997), Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Quilter, Harry (1883), ‘The Art of Rossetti’, Contemporary Review, February: 190–203.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 191

18/03/2013 15:50

192

Jane Morris

Radford, Andrew (2007), The Lost Girls: Demeter-Persephone and the Literary Imagination, 1850–1930, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Ranciére, Jacques (1994), The Names of History, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota. Reay, Diane (2004), ‘Gendering Bourdieu’s concepts of capitals? Emotional capital, women and social class’, Sociological Review, 52: 57–74. Rhys, Ernest (1931), Everyman Remembers, London: J. M. Dent and Sons. Ritchie, Anne Thackeray (1893), ‘Reminiscences’, in Alfred, Lord Tennyson and His Friends: A Series of 25 Portraits and Frontispiece in Photogravure from the Negatives of Mrs Julia Margaret Cameron and H. H. H. Cameron, London: Fisher Unwin, pp. 9–16. Robertson, W. Graham (1931), Time Was: The Reminiscences of W. Graham Robertson, London: Hamish Hamilton. Rose, Jonathan (2001), The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, New Haven: Yale University Press. Rossetti, William Michael (1895), Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters with a Memoir, 2 vols, London: Ellis and Elvey. Rossetti, William Michael (1906), Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, 2 vols, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Rothenstein, William (1931), Men and Memories: Recollections of William Rothenstein 1872–1900, London: Faber & Faber. Rowley, Charles (1911), Fifty Years of Work Without Wages, London: Hodder & Stoughton. Rubin, Gayle [1975] (2006), ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Ellen Lewin (ed.), Feminist Anthropology: A Reader, Malden: Blackwell, pp. 87–106. Salmon, Richard (2009), ‘The Physiognomy of the Lion: Encountering Literary Celebrity in the Nineteenth Century’, in Tom Mole (ed.), Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 60–78. Saunders, Clare Broome (2009), Women Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Scarry, Elaine (1985), The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Talia (2000), ‘Fashioning Aestheticism by Aestheticizing Fashion: Wilde, Beerbohm, and the Male Aesthetes’ Sartorial Codes’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 28.1: 39–54. Schaffer, Talia (2011), Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schaffer, Talia and Kathy Alexis Psomiades (eds) (1999), Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Scott, Joan W. (1992), ‘Experience’, in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorize the Political, New York: Routledge, pp. 22–40. Scott, William Bell (1892), Autobiographical notes of the Life of William Bell Scott: And Notices of his Artistic and Poetic Circle of Friends 1830 to 1882, ed. W. Minto, 2 vols, London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (1985), Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, New York: Columbia University Press.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 192

18/03/2013 15:50

Bibliography

193

Sharp, Frank C. and Jan Marsh (eds) (2012), The Collected Letters of Jane Morris, Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Sharp, William (1882), Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Record and a Study, London: Macmillan. Shaw, George Bernard (1936), ‘William Morris as I Knew Him’, in May Morris (ed.), William Morris: Artist, Writer, Socialist, vol. 2, Oxford: Blackwell. Shaw, George Bernard (1949), ‘More About Morris’, The Observer, November 6: 7. Shefer, Elaine (1985), ‘Pre-Raphaelite Clothing and the New Woman’, Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 6.1: 55–67. Shirland, Jonathan (2007), ‘“A Singularity of Appearance Counts Doubly in a Democracy of Clothes”: Whistler, Fancy Dress and the Camping of Artists Dress in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Visual Culture in Britain, 8.1: 15–35. Showalter, Elaine (1985), The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830–1980, New York: Penguin. Simons, John (2008), Rossetti’s Wombat: Pre-Raphaelites and Australian Animals in Victorian London, Middlesex University Press. Smith, Sidonie and Julia Watson (2001), Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Sonstroem, David (1970), Rossetti and the Fair Lady, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Spacks, Patricia Meyer (1985), Gossip, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Steedman, Carolyn (1987), Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Steedman, Carolyn (1992), ‘La theorie qui n’en est pas une, or why Clio doesn’t care’, History and Theory, 31.4 (December): 33–50. Steedman, Carolyn (2009), Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stephens, F. G. (1894), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London: Seeley and Co. Stoddard Holmes, Martha and Todd Chambers (2005), ‘Thinking through Pain’, Literature and Medicine 24.1: 127–41. Sturge Moore, T. and D. C. (eds) (1933), Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, London: Albert Murray. Surtees, Virginia (1971), The Paintings and Drawings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882): A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Surtees, Virginia (ed.) (1980), The Diaries of George Price Boyce, Norwich: Real World. Swanwick, H. M. (1935), I Have Been Young, London: Victor Gollancz. Swindells, Julia and Lisa Jardine (1990), What’s Left? Women in Culture and the Labour Movement, London and New York: Routledge. Thirkell, Angela (1931), Three Houses, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thompson, E. P. [1963] (1980), The Making of the English Working Class, London: Penguin. Thompson, E. P. [1955] (1976), William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary, London: Merlin Press. Thompson, Paul (1991), The Work of William Morris, Third Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tickner, Lisa (2003), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Tate Gallery: London.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 193

18/03/2013 15:50

194

Jane Morris

Tidcombe, Marianne (1996), Women Bookbinders 1880–1920, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press and British Library. Tirebuck, William (1882), Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Work and Influence, London: Elliot Stock. Todd, Pamela (2001), The Pre-Raphaelites at Home, London: Pavilion. Trahair, Richard C. S. (1999), Utopias and Utopians: An Historical Dictionary, Westport: Greenwood Press. Tuite, Clara (2007), ‘Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity’, ELH, 74.1: 59–88. Vadillo, Ana Parejo (2005), Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Vrettos, Athena (1995), Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Waggoner, Diane (2010), ‘From the Life: Portraiture in the 1860s’, in Diane Waggoner et al., The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875, Farnham: Lund Humphries, pp. 94–105. Waithe, Marcus (2006), William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Walkowitz, Judith R. (1992), City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Warhol, Robyn (2007), ‘Narrative Refusals and Generic Transformations in Austen and James: What Doesn’t Happen in Northanger Abbey and The Spoils of Poynton’, Henry James Review, 28: 259–68. Watkinson, Ray (1981), ‘Foreword’, Peter Faulkner, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and the Morrises, 1st Annual Kelmscot Lecture, London: William Morris Society. Watkinson, Ray (1988), ‘Red House Decorated’, Journal of William Morris Studies, 7.4: 10–15. Watts-Dunton, Theodore (1883), ‘The Truth About Rossetti’, The Nineteenth Century, (March): 404–23. Watts-Dunton, Theodore (1916), Old Familiar Faces, New York: Dutton & Co. Weekeley, Montague (1934), William Morris, London: Duckworth. Willis, Irene Cooper (1937), Vernon Lee’s Letters, privately published. Wilson, Sophia (1996), ‘Away with the Corsets, on with the Shifts’, in Simply Stunning: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of Dressing, Cheltenham: Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum, pp. 25–36. Winnicott, D. W. (1953), ‘Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena: A Study of the First Not-Me Possession’, The International Journal of PsychoAnalysis, 34.2: 89–97. Woolf, Virginia (1993), ‘On Being Ill’, in Rachel Bowlby (ed.), The Crowded Dance of Modern Life: Selected Essays, vol. 2, London: Penguin, pp. 43–53. Young, Bette Roth (1995), Emma Lazarus in Her World: Life and Letters, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society.

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 194

18/03/2013 15:50

Index

Adams, Katharine, 134 aesthetic dress, 132, 133–6, 138, 142n aesthetic self-fashioning see aesthetic self-formation aesthetic self-formation, 117, 126, 132, 133 Aestheticism, 126, 127, 134, 135, 138, 142n Ahmed, Sara, 173n Aldington, Richard, xi, xix n, 18 Altick, Richard, 98 Amigoni, David, 1 anecdote, xii, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 19n, 21, 31, 73, 84, 122, 125, 127, 151, 179 Angeli, Helen Rossetti, 10, 19n, 36, 61, 114, 120, 121, 133 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and Enemies, 36, 114 Arnold, Matthew, 98 Arts and Crafts exhibition (New Gallery), 163, 175n Arts and Crafts movement, 163, 164, 176n Asquith, Margot, 41 autodidacticism, 95, 99 Bad Ems, 66, 71, 76, 78 Bailin, Miriam, 76 Barthes, Roland, xiii, xiv, xviii Beizer, Janet, 18 Belsey, Catherine, xii, 18n Benson, Arthur, 25 Bingaman, Amy, 143, 147, 148 biography, xii, xvi, xvii, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 195

10, 18, 24, 29, 68, 69, 72, 89, 177, 179 Blind, Mathilde, 172n Blunt, Lady Anne, 41, 102 Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, xii, 22, 23, 35, 39, 40, 41–52, 55n, 56n, 60, 63, 72, 75, 77, 78, 80, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100, 101, 102, 103, 107, 108, 114, 116, 120, 127, 144, 156, 160, 161, 163, 166, 177, 178 In Vinculus, 166 My Diaries, xix n, 51 Secret Memoirs, 22, 39, 41, 42, 43, 46, 47, 52, 53n, 55n, 60, 166 Bodenheimer, Rosemarie, xix n, 18 Bodichon, Barbara, 76 bodily capital, 17 Bourdieu, Pierre, xiii, 2, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19n, 90, 181 Boyce, George, 110n, 145 Boyd, Alice, 4, 5, 30, 31, 33, 36, 52 Bradley, Katherine, 61 Briggs, R.C.H., 22, 37, 75 Brown, Ford Madox, 30, 76 Browning, Robert, 98 Buchanan, Robert, 28, 54n, 124, 140n Bullen, J. B., 131 Burden, Ann (Maizey), 111n, 144, 172n Burden, Bessie, 76, 144, 163, 172n, 175n Burden, Jane see Morris, Jane Burne-Jones, Edward, 76, 85, 86, 107, 148, 165, 170, 172–3n Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 26, 29, 30, 84, 107, 110n, 142n, 144, 147, 149, 156, 157, 161, 165, 172–3n, 177

18/03/2013 15:50

196

Jane Morris

Burne-Jones (cont.) Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, 84, 144, 177 Burney, Fanny, 96–7 The Diary and Letters of Madame d’Arblay, 96 Evelina, 96, 97 Butler, Samuel, 108 Erewhon, 108 Byron, George Gordon, 3, 9 Caine, T. Hall, 10, 25, 26–8, 54n, 101, 102, 129 Carleton, Dorothy, 53n Carlyle, Thomas and Jane, 76 Cassell’s Saturday Journal, 143 Cavendish, Lady Frederick, 142n Celebrity, xvi, 17, 23, 117, 123–4, 125, 140n Chambers, Todd, 67 Chapman, Alison, 181 Chatman, Seymour, xiv Cherry, Deborah, 3, 23, 70, 72 class, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, 2, 3, 11, 13, 14, 15, 62, 69, 70, 71, 74, 79, 83–5, 86, 87–8, 89–92, 93–4, 95–7, 99, 101, 109, 132, 139, 148, 151, 179, 181 class mobility see social mobility Cobden, Jane, 103, 105, 137 Cobden-Sanderson, Anne, 105, 106, 137, 163 Cobden-Sanderson, Thomas, 105, 106, 137, 163, 164 Cockerell, Olive, 144, 160–1, 175n Cockerell, Sydney, 19n, 29, 63, 67, 81n, 85, 86, 96, 98, 131, 144, 146, 157, 159, 160, 161, 163 Codell, Julie, 7 Cohan, Steven, xiv Cohen, William A., 18n, 53n, 60 Colclough, Stephen, 98 Colebrook, Claire, 118 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 97 Collins, Wilkie, 141n The Woman in White, 141n Colvin, Sidney, 128 Commonweal, 106 Cooper, Edith, 61 Coronio, Aglaia, 172n

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 196

Crane, Lucy, 132, 162, 175n Crane, Walter, 132, 162, 175n cultural capital, 17, 19n, 85, 91, 96, 98, 99, 109, 123, 170 daisy wall hangings, 149–51, 171 Dante Alighieri, 97 De Coverly, Roger, 164 De Morgan, Evelyn, 141n De Morgan, Mary, 80–1n, 112n, 159, 160, 163, 166, 174n, 176n The Wind Fairies, 159, 175n De Morgan, Sophia, 112n, 174–5n De Morgan, William, 159 Desperate Romantics (BBC), 179 Dickens, Charles, 145 Barnaby Rudge, 145 disavowal, 84, 89, 109n, 120, 154 Dixon, Rev. Thomas, 145 Doughty, Oswald, 7, 10, 24, 29 Du Maurier, George, 114, 127, 135 ‘Frustrated Social Ambition’, 135–6 ‘Six-Mark Teapot’, 135–6 Dunn, Henry Treffry, 7, 25, 139n Egypt, 49, 94, 102, 103 Eliot, George, xix n, 76 Ellis, Frederick, 100 Ellis, Phyllis, 100 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 1, 2, 58 The Women of England, 58 Faulkner, Charles, 172n Faulkner, Peter, 22, 178 Fay, Edward Francis, 174n Felski, Rita, 85 Field, Michael, 61 Fleming, Margaret, 86, 110n Ford, Colin, 141n Forman, H. Buxton, 118 Foucault, Michel, 60 Fox, Pamela, 90 Francillon, R. E., 59, 60, 80n Frawley, Maria, 74 Fredeman, William E., 4, 6, 19n, 33, 38 Freedgood, Elaine, 12, 19n Freud, Sigmund, 109n Gagnier, Regenia, 89, 95 Gay, Peter, 68

18/03/2013 15:50

Index Gender, xiii, xiv, xvi, xviii, 2, 3, 11, 12, 13, 16, 58, 62, 70–1, 73, 74, 79, 91, 93, 95–6, 97, 106, 122, 131–2, 134, 135–6, 138, 146, 147, 148, 170, 177, 179, 181 Gere, Charles, 141n, 142n Gere, Charlotte, 135, 142n Giddens, Anthony, 15 Gilbert, Sandra, 70 Glasier, Bruce, 107, 118, 139n Gosse, Edmund, 128, 129, 134 gossip, xii, 1, 2, 3, 4–5, 6, 18n, 23, 29, 30, 31, 32, 42, 90, 100, 124 Greenblatt, Stephen, 8, 19n, 117, 118, 139n, 177 Gregory, Lady Augusta, 41 Greenwell, Dora, 172n Grosvenor Gallery, 125, 140n Grylls, Rosalie Glynn, xv, 10–11, 19n, 37, 38, 61–2, 106, 121 Portrait of Rossetti, xv, 10, 61, 106 Gubar, Susan, 70 Gunner, Floss, 94, 104 ‘Gypsy-ness’, 120 H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), xix n habitus, 2, 13–16, 17, 84, 90, 91, 109, 148, 150, 181 Hake, George, 30 Hake, T. G., 25, 30, 32, 33, 53n, 82n Hannay, David, 129, 130, 141n Hardy, Thomas, 13 Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 13 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 135 The Marble Faun, 135 Henderson, Philip, 65, 81n, 173n Hiffernan, Joanna, 134 Hill, Octavia, 161 Holywell (Oxford), 85, 87–8 Howard, George (Earl of Carlisle), 41, 62, 74, 75, 78 Howard, Rosalind, 41, 42, 62–5, 74, 75, 78, 93, 97, 100, 111n, 138, 142n, 144 Howell, Charles Augustus, 32 Hozier, Lady Blanche, 41 Hudson family, 104 Hunt, Violet, 29, 30, 52n Huxley, Henrietta and T. H., 76

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 197

197

icon, xviii, 117, 123 Ingelow, Jean, 172n invalidism, 57, 58–9, 65–80 Ireland, 102, 103, 166 Italy, 62, 63, 70, 74, 75, 77, 78, 93, 94, 100, 102, 105, 127, 137, 160, 164 James, Alice, 58 James, Henry, xiii, 58, 61, 75, 79, 118, 125, 134 Jardine, Lisa, 109n Jefferies, Richard, 108 After London, or Wild England, 108 Kaplan, Cora, 179 keepsake books, 2, 58, 97–8, 99, 111n, 164 Kelmscott bed coverlet, 16, 160, 166–70, 176n, 180 Kelmscott House, 45, 59, 60, 77, 94, 104, 107, 118, 131, 143, 146 Kelmscott Manor, 3, 10, 11, 24, 33, 35, 39, 44–5, 46, 49, 50, 51, 54n, 55n, 60, 77, 94, 99, 100, 105, 111n, 119, 122, 130, 134, 141n, 143, 145, 146, 152, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 166, 167, 169, 174n Kelmscott Press, 164, 166 Kelmscott village, 98 Kelvin, Norman, 68, 101 Knight, Joseph, 25 Kortsch, Christine Bayles, 170 Kropotkin, Peter, 107 Ladies National Association, 106 Landor, Walter Savage, 21, 52 Langtry, Lillie, 23 Lawler, Steph, 85 Lazarus, Emma, 138 Le Gallienne, Richard, 3, 11, 12, 119, 125 Lee, Vernon, 83, 98, 99, 100, 101, 111n, 125, 127, 133, 134, 135, 140n Miss Brown, 100, 111n, 133–4, 135, 140–1n letters, xvii, 2, 3, 4–7, 23, 29–35, 36–9, 47, 50, 67–8, 74, 76, 85–9, 99–101, 177, 178 Lewes, G. H., 76 Lewis, Roger C., 90

18/03/2013 15:50

198

Jane Morris

life writing, xvi, 1, 2, 18, 113; see also biography Light, Alison, 93 Lindsay, Jack, 83, 106 Longford, Elizabeth, 22 Louis, Margot K., 171n ‘Lucretia Borgia’, 5, 19n, 30 Lutz, Deborah, 143, 171 Lyon, Janet, 125 MacCarthy, Fiona, 10, 57, 72, 73, 74, 75, 81n, 101, 111, 143, 156 MacDonald, George, 78, 127 McDougall, Joyce, 67, 81n McGann, Jerome, 18n Mackail, J. W., 9, 67, 68, 69, 75, 83, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 108, 110n Life of William Morris, 9, 67, 85, 91, 145, 156 Maiden Tribute demonstration, 105 Mancoff, Debra N., xvi Marillier, H. C., 53n Marsh, Jan, xv, xvi, xix n, 9, 19n, 39, 47, 52n, 66, 70–2, 89, 90, 147, 148, 173n, 174n, 176n Marshall, P. P., 76 Matthews, Henry, 110n Mays, Kelly J., 95 Meeres, Horace, 162 Meredith, George, 97 Meynell, Esther, 116 Middleton, John Henry, 54n Miles, Andrew, 87 Mole, Tom, 123 Montrose, Louis, 8 Morris & Co., 147, 160, 162, 163, 167, 170, 171 Morris, Jane agency of, 16, 23, 38, 40, 52, 119, 123, 126, 131, 148–9, 162, 170, 171, 179, 181 book-making, design and decoration, 97–8, 163, 164–6, 175–6n, 180 celebrity, 23, 117, 123–7 class, xi, xviii, xix, 11, 14, 15–16, 61, 69, 83–5, 86–7, 90, 91, 92, 93–7, 99, 101, 106, 109, 120, 148, 151, 181 correspondence, xvi, xvii–xviii, 36–9, 47–50, 51–2, 62–5, 74–5, 76, 77,

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 198

78, 87–8, 80, 93, 95, 97, 100, 101–4, 107, 108–9, 111n, 127–9, 152, 158, 159, 161, 163, 177–8, 181 ‘Discovery’, xi, 42, 84 domestic management skills, 93–5, 143, 149, 155, 159, 161–2, 163 dress, 120, 130–1, 132, 133, 134, 136, 137–8, 141n, 153 engagement, 22, 92–3, 145 exoticism, xiii, 65, 115, 119–22, 179 family relationships, 144, 146, 151–8, 173–4n friendships, 34–5, 57, 88, 105, 107, 144, 159–61, 171 ‘Gypsy’ origins, 119–21 ill health, 57, 58–9, 65–80 illicit relationships, 23, 24, 26–30, 32, 35, 36–40, 41–2, 44–52, 178, 179 Italian fluency, 48, 93, 111n modelling, 127, 128, 131, 133, 136, 160, 163 music, 92 myth of, xiii–xiv, xv, xviii, 1–2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 16, 21, 23, 41, 47, 57, 58, 62, 65, 79, 84, 101, 109, 115, 116, 123, 143, 144, 145, 154, 179–80, 181 needlework, 130–1, 136, 137, 138, 142n, 149–51, 160, 162, 163, 166–71 politics, 101–9 Pre-Raphaelite icon, xii, 17, 79, 113, 116, 117, 123, 126, 127, 179 reading habits, 95, 96–7, 98–9 reticence, 57–65, 80 Rossetti’s images of, 1, 22, 25–6, 65, 75, 113–14, 116, 118, 119, 124, 125, 126–7, 129, 131, 133, 138, 144, 179 spiritualism, 160, 174–5n Morris, Jenny, 66, 68, 72, 78, 79, 107, 144, 148, 151, 152, 156–7 Morris, May, xix n, 10, 35, 59, 66, 73, 75, 79, 100, 106, 122, 131, 133, 144, 146, 148, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163, 167, 173–4n Introductions to Collected Works of William Morris, 10, 35, 149, 152, 153, 154, 174n

18/03/2013 15:50

Index Morris, William, xi, xvi, 9, 12, 21, 22, 35, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 47, 51, 57, 65, 67, 68, 69, 72, 73, 74, 75, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 93, 94, 95, 99, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 116, 117, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152–3, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171 La Belle Iseult, 21, 139n, 145 A Book of Verse, 165 ‘On the Lesser Arts’, 163 ‘Mrs. Cimabue Brown’, 135 Murphy, W. M., 156 myth, xiii–xiv, xviii, 7, 180 New, Edmund, 85, 87, 146 new historicism, 8 Newcombe, Bertha, 100 Nicholson, Mary, 110n Nightingale, Florence, 70 Nord, Deborah Epstein, 120 Norton, Caroline, 23 Norton, Charles Eliot, 76, 127, 144 Norton, Susan Sedgwick, 78, 141n, 144, 152 Novak, Daniel, 141n ‘Old Charlotte’, 61 Owen, Albert K., 108 Pall Mall Gazette, 105 The Pankhursts, 105 Pansy, 51, 56n paradigm of traits, xiv–xv, 7, 9, 179 Parsons, John Robert, 114, 130, 133 Pattle sisters, 135, 138 Payne, John Burnell, 76 Penkill Papers, 4, 6, 33 Persephone/Proserpine, 113, 114, 144, 171–2n; see also Rossetti, Proserpine Placci, Carlo, 140–1n Pollen, John, 42 Pollen, Minny, 42, 56n Pollock, Griselda, 70, 72 Pre-Raphaelite art, 59, 127, 128 Price, Cormell (Crom), 75, 94, 104 Prinsep, Valentine, 145 Psomiades, Kathy, 126

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 199

199

Queen Square, 153 Queen Victoria, 112n Quilter, Harry, 128, 129, 130 Quinces, 12, 19n, 119 Quinn, John, 155, 158 Ranciére, Jacques, xii Reading, 95–6, 98, 99 Red House, 143, 144, 145, 146–9, 153, 161, 170, 171, 172–3n, 176n Rhymers’ Club, 119 Rhys, Ernest, 116, 119 Richardson, Samuel, 97 Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, 135 Robertson, Graham, 29–30, 61, 122–3, 139n Rose, Jonathan, 95 Rossetti, Christina, 33, 111n, 125 ‘In an Artist’s Studio’, 125 Sing-Song, 111n Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, xi, xv–xvi, 3–4, 5, 7, 10, 21, 23, 24–33, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54n, 57, 59, 60, 61, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 77, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 101, 102, 108, 111n, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 122, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 136, 146, 148, 153, 154, 159, 160, 165, 170, 173–4n, 178 Astarte Syriaca, 96 Beata Beatrix, 129 ‘The Kelmscott Love Sonnets’, 165 La Pia de’ Tolomei, 137 Mrs. William Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), 130–1, 133, 141n Perlascura, 139n Proserpine, 130, 171–2n Silence, 59, 140n Rossetti, William Michael, 8, 22, 25–6, 30, 31, 32, 52, 55n, 68, 69, 111n, 113, 114, 119, 122, 139n, 175n Rothenstein, William, 61, 93 Rowley, Charles, 146, 172n Royal Academy, 125 Rubin, Gayle, 40 Ruskin, John, 97, 98, 160 Salmon, Richard, 140n salon culture, 125–6

18/03/2013 15:50

200

Jane Morris

Saunders, Clare Broome, 139n Scarry, Elaine, 67 Schaffer, Talia, 173n Scott, Letitia, 4, 5, 119 Scott, William Bell, xii, 4, 5, 6, 10, 19n, 30, 31, 32, 33, 36, 52, 53n, 54n, 59, 113, 119 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 41 servants, 93, 110n sexuality, xii, 2, 3, 11, 25, 60, 69, 132, 179 shame, 84, 85, 86, 89, 91, 99, 109 Sharp, Frank C., xvi Sharp, William, 25, 129 Shaw, George Bernard, xiii, 11, 12, 58, 59, 61, 99, 106, 107, 111n, 143, 144, 154, 160, 163, 174n Shields, Frederic, 139–40n Shires, Linda, xiv Shirland, Jonathan, 131 Siddall, Elizabeth, xii, xix n, 10, 21, 28, 29, 39, 47, 70, 71, 84, 129, 136, 138, 172–3n Silence, xv, 57–65, 67, 80 Simons, John, 39 social mobility, 14, 15–16, 61, 84, 85–94, 97, 99, 117, 144 socialism, xviii, 83, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111n Socialist League, 105, 106 Sonstroem, David, 4, 11, 12, 38 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 4–5 Sparling, Harry, 100, 101, 106 Stead, W. T., 105 Steedman, Carolyn, xiii, xvi–xvii, 12, 19n, 90, 91, 180 Stephens, F. G., 25 Stillman, Marie Spartali, 42–3, 49–50, 60, 127, 140n, 144, 157, 159, 160, 161, 172n, 175n Stoddard Holmes, Martha, 67 strawberries, 13 suet, 12 Swanwick, Helena, 94 Swinburne, Algernon, 98, 103, 110n, 172n Swindells, Julia, 109n

PARKINS 9780748641277 PRINT.indd 200

Talbot, Margaret, 23, 42, 55n, 56n Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 98 Terry, Ellen, 122 textile literacy, 170–1 Thirkell, Angela, 29, 30, 118, 134 Thompson, E. P., 9, 19n, 59, 60, 69, 71, 73, 74, 76, 83, 106, 109n Thompson, Paul, 59 Tickner, Lisa, 24 Tidcombe, Marian, 165 Tirebuck, William, 25, 124 Topolobampo, 108–9 transitional objects, 73, 153, 173n Tuite, Clara, 124, 140n upward mobility see social mobility utopian communities, 108–9 utopian fiction, 108 Vrettos, Athena, 74, 79 Waggoner, Diane, 141n Walkowitz, Judith, 105 Walters, Catherine (‘Skittles’), 23 Ward, Mary, 97 Watkinson, Ray, 178, 179 Watts, G. F., 135 Watts-Dunton, Theodore, 33, 61, 93, 128, 130 Webb, Philip, 33–5, 51, 85, 86, 87–8, 89, 90, 96, 98, 146, 151, 157, 159, 161, 162, 173n Whistler, James McNeill, 117, 122, 125, 126, 134, 138, 139n Symphony in White No. 1: The White Girl, 134 Wilde, Oscar, 111n, 117, 126, 132, 135, 136, 138, 141n Winnicott, D. W., 173n Women’s suffrage, 104–5 wonder, 117–18, 122, 139n Woolf, Virginia, 79, 94 Yeats, W. B., 119 Zambaco, Marie, 172n zebu, 122

18/03/2013 15:50