Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Immortalized by painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and widely imitated by fashionable women, Jane Morris (1839-1914) was not a typical Victorian beauty. Her unruly dark hair, lanky figure, and loose garments stood out in an age that favored petite, fair-haired women with feminine curves. Drawing on lavish portraits and rare photographs, Debra Mancoff examines Morris's image within the context of Pre-Raphaelite aesthetic ideals and Victorian standards of fashion. Part biography, part art history, and part cultural study, Jane Morris traces the beauty's rise from an eighteen-year-old working-class Oxford girl to a virtual "supermodel" for the Pre-Raphaelites, focusing on her relationships with artist-designer William Morris, whom she married in 1859, and Rossetti, with whom she shared a life-long romance.