‘Stunner’ Jane ...and a VERY bohemian love triangle
How We Might Live Suzanne Fagence Cooper Quercus £30 )))))
In June 1860, William Morris and his bride Jane moved into Red House, a magical domestic space on the Kent-London border built to his exact specifications. Its steeply gabled roofs and romantic oriel windows owed everything to William’s love of the revived Gothic style. As his friend, the painter D.G. Rossetti, reported, the end effect was ‘more a poem than a house’.
This, though, was not simply a rich man’s stab at playing medieval lords and ladies. William Morris planned to share his earthly paradise with his close friends Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones and their wives. Rejecting fusty Victorian conventions, these young people would live communally, working alongside each other as artists, lovers and friends. They would write, they would paint, they would make beautiful objects and tend the exquisite gardens. And luckily, since William was born wealthy, there would be servants on hand to make the beds and do the washing-up.
It would be easy to mock, and plenty of contemporaries did make snide remarks about these idealistic twentysomethings attempting to live as though they had just stepped out of Camelot. But William was deadly serious in his ambition to turn away from the ugly mass production and spendspend-spend culture of Victorian England and live in a more mindful way. Red House was decorated with hand-made objects and much of the food came seasonally from the kitchen garden. And nobody was more central to this project of ‘how we might live’ than William’s beautiful teenage bride, Jane.
In this lyrical book, art historian Suzanne Fagence Cooper retells the story of how William and Jane Morris, that most unlikely of couples, tried, and failed, and tried again to live according to these new ideals. The details of how they met are well known. He was a newly graduated Oxford student who had returned to paint murals on the walls of the swanky Union Library. She was the slum-dwelling daughter of a drunk and violent ostler who made her living as a college servant. By marrying Jane, William set in motion a Cinderella-like transformation.
Jane is reported as saying later in life that ‘I never loved him’. But Cooper is keen that we should not see her as a cheap gold-digger. Highly intelligent, well-read and the maker of exquisite embroidery, Jane was as excited as her fiance at the prospect of creating a life in which, to paraphrase William, they would have nothing in their house that was not either useful or beautiful.
Jane’s designs – all swirling lilies and ripe pomegranates – became a key component of the William Morris aesthetic, especially his famous wallpaper. When, later, they opened a shop on London’s Oxford Street, Jane’s embroidered pieces were key to getting customers over the threshold.
Of course, the Morrises’ life together was not simply one of riverside picnics and medieval madrigals. Communal living could easily degenerate into ugly, jealous scenes. Jane had a long affair with her husband’s mentor Rossetti, who quickly became obsessed with her. It is, though, thanks to Rossetti that we have a full record of the extraordinary physical impact of Jane Morris on Victorian aesthetic ideals. In paintings including Proserpine (1874) and Blue Silk Dress (1868), Rossetti shows us the Pre-Raphaelite ‘stunner’ (to use his slightly derogatory term) in all her magnificence. Here is Jane’s swanlike neck, her luscious bee-stung lips and, of course, that extraordinary waterfall of ebony curls. Crucially, though, Jane has made her own magnificent costumes, in effect becoming a co-producer of these iconic images.
It’s clear that Jane didn’t relish being the centre of attention, not least because she feared gossip about her affair with Rossetti. But it is also apparent, says Cooper, that she comported herself with self-possession and dignity, transcending any embarrassment about her humble origins. In adult life her friends included aristocrats such as Lady Rosalind Howard as well as Georgie BurneJones, who became ‘Lady Burne-Jones’ when her husband was made a baronet.
In fact, Burne-Jones becoming ‘Sir Edward’ was one of the times when the Morrises’ ideals of communal living came closest to rupture. William was a passionate socialist. Much of his 50s was spent travelling around the country with Eleanor Marx, encouraging the working men of industrial Britain to
revolt against their mean and cramped conditions. Jane was less politically active, not least because she had the responsibility of a disabled daughter, but she invested a great deal of time in looking after her husband’s workforce, making sure that everyone was rested and well fed. She was a glorious cook and Cooper gives us several of her recipes for such delights as ‘Haricot Bean Soup’ and ‘Cornish Pasties’.
The one disappointment in this enjoyable book is that it contains hardly any illustrations. It would have been lovely to see, as well as read about, the wonderful experiment in living that Jane and William Morris set in motion. For despite the inevitable stumbles, they embodied a vision of the environmentally conscious, low-spend lifestyle that speaks to so many of us today.