the Morrises at home

 

Suzanne Fagence Cooper previously chronicled the adept manner in which Effie Gray extricated herself from an unhappy, unconsummated marriage to John Ruskin in order to become the wife and artistic partner of John Millais.  In ‘How We Might Live: at Home with Jane and William Morris’ she traces the Morrises’ shared and separate lives with clarity and judicious assessment.  

The marriage of William Morris, designer-businessman, and Jane Burden, stableman’s uneducated daughter, has always been the subject of curiosity.  Not so much for its cross-class features, which were relatively common in the Victorian age, but for its sequel.   Eight years after the wedding and the birth of two children, Jane began a love affair with artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Morris’s friend and business partner – with the agreement if not approval of her husband.

William Morris is everyone’s hero.  Jane has a terrible reputation, as silent, sulky, faithless wife.  With sympathetic warmth, Cooper leads us through the couple’s experiences.  She imagines them in various locations but does not invent their thoughts. Some known details are omitted – Jane’s unfulfilled wish for a son, her clandestine correspondence with Rossetti, Morris’s extravagant spending.  But there is so much to include.  Notably the evolution of Morris’ aesthetic taste from quaint medieval to proto-modern plainness, plus the analytical account of the tiny ornamented booklets that Jane created - when and for whom were they designed?  

No letters from Jane to Morris or his family survive, so we don’t know what she called him at home.  In the group, he was ‘Topsy’ or ‘Top’; outside it would always be ‘Mr Morris’.

In its focus on personal lives, biography like this is not ‘history from below’ so much as what Phyllis Rose called ‘higher gossip’.   It draws readers along engaging narratives to which we can relate.  Morris, whose achievements are so various in poetry, design, manufacturing, politics, calligraphy, translation and publishing, also wrote of his ‘disappointments and tacenda’ – about which to keep silent.  These include his failure as a lover, and most painfully, the awfulness of Jenny’s epilepsy, which struck when she was fifteen, blighting both her own days and those of the family.   Jane grieved acutely and had her own ‘unspoken’ list of regrets.

The strength of Cooper’s storytelling, signalled in the book’s subtitle, is its attention to how wife and husband created each of their homes, with comfort and fine objects but no luxurious superfluity.  If we can believe it, nothing that was not either beautiful or useful.  

Their relationship, too, was a shared construction, mortared with tact, which weathered the storms.  When Rossetti’s guilt for  ‘stealing’ his friend’s wife drove him to a paranoid breakdown, Morris allowed him to convalesce at Kelmscott until Jane acknowledged the affair was at its end.    Morris did not  gloat over this outcome, and the subsequent affection  between the couple was noted by all observers.   Jane devoted her widowhood to securing Morris’s memory through books and buildings – his lifelong pleasures.