Jane Morris
The Burden of History
A scholarly monograph devoted to Jane Morris, an icon of Victorian art whose face continues to grace a range of Pre-Raphaelite merchandise
Described by Henry James as a 'dark, silent, medieval woman', Jane Burden Morris has tended to remain a rather one-dimensional figure in subsequent accounts. This book, however, challenges the stereotype of Jane Morris as silent model, reclusive invalid, and unfaithful wife. Drawing on extensive archival research as well as the biographical and literary tradition surrounding William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the book argues that Jane Morris is a figure who complicates current understandings of Victorian female subjectivity because she does not fit neatly into Victorian categories of feminine identity. She was a working-class woman who married into middle-class affluence, an artist's model who became an accomplished embroiderer and designer, and an apparently reclusive, silent invalid who was the lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Wilfred Scawen Blunt.
Jane Morris and the Burden of History particularly focuses on textual representations - in letters, diaries, memoirs and novels - from the Victorian period onwards, in order to investigate the cultural transmission and resilience of the stereotype of Jane Morris. Drawing on recent reconceptualisations of gender, auto/biography, and afterlives, this book urges readers to think differently - about an extraordinary woman and about life-writing in the Victorian period.
- Key Features:
- First scholarly study of Jane Morris, which seeks to challenge the stereotype surrounding her as melancholy invalid and Pre-Raphaelite femme fatale
- Innovative case study of the role of class, gender and sexuality in the formation of Victorian feminine subjectivity
- Contribution to emerging field of new biography and Victorian afterlives through the inclusion and examination of a wide variety of texts which construct the self
- Original exploration of feminine creative agency that challenges conventional understandings of masculine artistic autonomy in the Victorian period
Chronology
Illustrations
Preface
Introduction: Life & Letters
I. ‘Is it not too daring and altogether too inexplicable?’: Gossip, anecdote & biography
II. Suet & strawberries: Life writing & habitus
Chapter 1. Scandal
I. ‘The lady I spoke about’: Jane & Gabriel
II. ‘In thy shut lips what secrets!’: Jane & Wilfrid
Chapter 2. Silence’
I. ‘What more can I say’: The reticence of Jane Morris
II. ‘Dear suffering Janey’: The myth of invalidism
Chapter 3. Class
I. Social mobility and ‘rather sad lives’
II. Politics and ‘talking in the usual Socialistic fashion’
Chapter 4. Icon
I. Wonder: ‘she haunts me still’
II. Celebrity: The style of ‘the famous Mrs Morris’
Chapter 5. Home
I. ‘So much love dearest’: Jane Morris at home
II. Si je puis: Jane Morris’s creative agency
Conclusion
Endnotes
Bibliography
Index.
Parkins’ deeply original and lucid book advances current life-writing scholarship to show how theoretically informed critical readings of representations of Jane Morris can restore self and subjectivity to full historical complexity. It’s essential reading for scholars of the Victorian period with interests in ‘lives’ and their multiple locations and meanings.
