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Jane Morris: The Burden of History, by Wendy Parkins; pp. 256. Edinburgh and New York: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, £70.00, $120.00.
Anyone with an interest in the Pre-Raphaelites has seen Jane Morris through the eyes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Given their romantic relationship, the images of Jane in the guise of La Pia, Mariana, or Proserpine carry an implicit narrative: the poet-painter's beloved is in thrall to a sadistic husband, a false lover, a chthonic god; to wit, William Morris. Rossetti's personal, pictorial, and poetic allegorizing was coterie knowledge at first. But as his fame grew, people who recorded their impressions of Jane Morris generally saw her either as a picture (and love story) come to life, or as a disappointing approximation of an original in oils. As Wendy Parkins points out, Rossetti's images of Jane fed into a set of depictions, generated and perpetuated for the most part by men, that have largely defined Jane Morris ever since: the morbid muse and model, the silent woman, the supine invalid, and, more abstractly, the working-class Galatea refashioned to become wife to William Morris, and mistress in turn of the great Rossetti and the lesser Wilfrid Scawen Blunt.
The standard repost to misleading myths would be a counter-narrative based on primary evidence, but that won't work with Jane Morris, whose life, like that of many women whose names are remembered, is less well-documented than that of comparable men. As Parkins points out, Jane was the daughter of a drinking and likely abusive groom who, having risen in the world, disclaimed (regrettably) her class origin. So far as we know, her first surviving letter dates from 1869 when she was thirty and no longer the wife and creative partner of the country gentleman artist of Red House, but of the artistic businessman living above the Queen Square shop-when the tale of Janey and Gabriel...