William Morris’s unsung, brilliant daughter
May Morris loved to eulogise her father – but, as a new show reveals, she was hugely talented herself. Lucy Davies reports
May Morris, daughter of the poet and designer William, was never ordinary. Growing up in 1870s Oxfordshire, she learned to punt, handle maggots for fishing, and could often be found astride the gables of Kelmscott Manor, her parents’ 17th-century house, engaged in a game she called “roof-riding”, from which she would have to be rescued by the elderly gardener.
She certainly stood out. Contrary to the corsetry and ribbons worn by other nine-year-old Victorian children, May was dressed in loose gowns made from sturdy, rough fabric. Her mother, the Pre-raphaelite muse and model Jane, also cut her daughter’s crinkly hair into a pageboy style, “with a celerity and boldness that in later days has fairly taken my breath away,” May recalled.
As a young woman in 1890s London, she had not only a wagepaying managerial role in her father’s firm, Morris & Co (she contributed as many, if not more flower and foliage designs to the business than he), but accompanied him, banner aloft, to his socialist meetings. An observer recalled seeing her riding on a platform in Hyde Park, “looking like a French revolutionary going to execution”.
She weathered an ill-fated love affair with the playwright George Bernard Shaw, a divorce (from Henry Halliday Sparling) and lived out her autumn years with a red-cheeked, knickerbocker-wearing Land Girl named Miss Lobb. The pair took up camping when May was 60, and fulfilled her lifelong ambition to visit Iceland, for which she packed Horlicks and 11 pounds of bacon.
It seems incredible that such an extraordinary life has gone virtually unnoticed. A biography of May and her mother (long out of print) was published in 1986, but new research and a series of discoveries reposition her as an integral figure in the Arts and Crafts movement.
Now, around 80 of her creations – jewellery, embroidery pieces and silk hangings, book designs and watercolours, most of which have only ever been seen by the people who commissioned them – go on show at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow. Included are a series of personal items, only very recently unearthed, such as a valentine she made for Bernard Shaw, and the silkbound, handmade journal she wrote the summer she was eight.
In it, she describes herself as “untidy and always very dirty”, but her blue eyes and blonde hair meant she often sat for her father’s Pre-raphaelite artist friends, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti – some of his paintings and her drawings are included.
Born in 1862, at Red House in Bexleyheath, May inherited from her father an unusually subtle understanding of natural forms, polished on the walks they took together among the hedgerows. In her wallpaper designs – Honeysuckle is the best-known – she drew on them heavily.
She also seems to have inherited her father’s strong character. When she was 23, he made her head of the embroidery department of Morris & Co. “That was a major responsibility,” says Rowan Bain, exhibition curator, “and Morris was a good businessman. He wouldn’t have done it out of nepotism; he did it because he really thought she was capable. He was really proud of May.”
It wasn’t long before her needlework pieces came to the notice of the London art schools. She taught at some of them, too – her notes for these, a delightfully chaotic mess of heavily underlined snatches of text and tiny drawings – are a highlight of the show.
May’s life was not without disappointment. Her only sister, Jenny, developed epilepsy in her teens and became severely disabled, her once sharp mind dulled by the sedative bromide, and eventually she had to be sent to an asylum.
The real tragedy, though, began in 1884, when she met Bernard Shaw, then the impoverished but bullheaded author of four unpublished novels. He had attended one of the weekly Socialist League meetings, and wrote later: “One Sunday evening… I looked at her, rejoicing in her lovely dress and lovely self; and she looked at me very carefully and quite deliberately made a gesture of assent with her eyes. I was immediately conscious that a Mystic Betrothal was registered in heaven.”
Over the next two years, letters, invitations, requests for photographs and the valentine exchanged hands, but, though a marriage proposal was expected, in the end Shaw rejected May, pleading poverty (although it later emerged he was entangled with several other women instead).
May’s rebound marriage in 1890 to another socialist, Sparling, lasted less than a decade. Two years after it began, Shaw moved in. For a while, the trio persuaded themselves they could be friends, in a most modern arrangement, but it wasn’t long before the attraction between Shaw and May reignited. They went out in public together for two years, but in 1894, and out of the blue, Shaw bolted. Interrogated on the subject later, he said: “As I had enough sexual satisfaction available elsewhere I was perfectly content to leave all that to Sparling and go on platonically; but May was not. There followed the catastrophe.”
“They moved in quite liberal circles,” says Bain, “but for May, it was still a real blow. Fortunately she had been brought up to be quite robust and she was not the type to get very depressed by things. She took great pleasure in nature and she read a huge amount – usually four books on the go at once.”
When Jane died in 1914, following William’s death in 1896, May moved permanently to Kelmscott Manor. Here, until she died in 1938, she lived among some of her beautiful creations but frugally, with no electricity or piped water, her piano on stilts in case of floods.
To the end, she dedicated herself to panegyrising her father, ensuring that his philosophies and his works would not be forgotten. But, we now know, it was at the expense of any real recognition for herself.
As an old woman, she found friendship with Bernard Shaw again, though not romantically. In one of her letters to him, she wrote, “I’m a remarkable woman – always was, though none of you seemed to think so.” It was an uncharacteristic boast, and too little, too late, but all the more poignant for it.