HOW WE MIGHT LIVE
AT HOME WITH JANE AND WILLIAM MORRIS
SUZANNE FAGENCE COOPER
Quercus, 536pp, £30
Jane Morris, with her wavy cloud of black hair, pouting lips and silently mysterious expression, became the embodiment of the mid-Victorian Pre-Raphaelite feminine ideal. Married to the bouncy polymath William but inamorata of the sultry philanderer Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Jane, daughter of an Oxford ostler, is seen but rarely heard. Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s new book examines the Morris domestic set-up and attempts to plumb the depths of the woman described by Henry James as ‘a figure cut out of a missal – an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity’.
In the Times, Laura Freeman thought she’d done a good job given the constraints of pinning down a legend. ‘This is a book of guesses and whispers. Fagence Cooper asks many open-ended questions. “Was Jane flattered by the approach of the two London artists?” “How did she become so accomplished?” “What was Jane doing and feeling during this distressing time?”’
But the author of the fannycornforthblogspot ‘absolutely loved’ the book: ‘Jane was not just the passive observer of her own life [but] I was still surprised by her laughter, which was “unforgettable”, and exactly how active she was in the creation and management of her life, art and legacy.’ This after all is the woman who, when she gave a young poet a jar of her quince jam, was told by him that it was like ‘receiving it from the hands of Helen of Troy’.
In the , art historian Tanya Harrod thought that the author had done very well, against the odds, ‘in restoring some reality to our view of Jane Morris, giving a proper sense of a woman with
