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by Debra N. Mancoff.
Pomegranate Comunications, San Francisco, CA, U.S.A., 2000.
ISBN: 0-7649-1337-9.
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens, 2022 X Avenue, Dysart, IA 52224-9767, U.S.A.
E-mail: ballast@netins.net


In recent years, there has been increased interest in Victorian-era designer and writer William Morris, protagonist of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. There is also a parallel interest in his wife, Jane (nee Burden) Morris, a stableman's daughter, who, despite or maybe because of her strange, atypical beauty (tall and angular, with dark unruly hair, thick eyebrows, and a turned-down pouty upper lip) spent most of her miserable marriage sitting apart from the dinner guests, sans corset and crinoline, in handsewn shapeless velvet gowns. She seems always to have looked forlorn, and, for whatever reason, apparently said very little. In this new biography, there are so many portraits of her, whether paintings or photographs, that there are even one or two in which she doesn't look at all interesting. On the other hand, there are also some (page 6, for example) that clearly, convincingly show why she was (and still is) the Pre-Raphaelite paragon of exotic, unattainable beauty, the Arthurian damsel in distress. The painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a close friend and business partner of Morris, must have thought of Morris as King Arthur, Jane as Guinevere, and himself a pudgy Lancelot. For more than a decade, as Rossetti's drug addiction grew and his reason deteriorated, he used her as his model, while they also engaged in romantic liaisons, which Morris was aware of but felt he could do nothing about. This and much more is discussed with restraint in this readable, solidly researched account of the life of someone who might be characterized today as a "supermodel."

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 16, No. 4, Summer 2001.)

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