Was Jane Morris a sphinx without a secret?

William Morris was the son of a stock-broker and Jane Burden was the daughter of a stablehand. He was raised in a mansion in Walthamstow (now the William Morris Gallery) and she grew up in a hovel in Oxford. Had she not been talent-spotted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti when she was leaving the theatre one night, Jane would have become a college servant rather than an artist’s muse.

She married Morris when she was 19, after he had reproduced her as ‘La Belle Iseult’, trapped in a room between a window and a bed, and put her through intensive elocution lessons as well as a crash course in music, art and literature. No trace of her former accent could be heard when she vowed to honour and obey him, and she carried herself from that day forward with the grandeur of a great queen. She was never in love with her husband, she later confessed to the poet and philanderer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, with whom she had an affair in her middle years. Blunt himself was drawn to Jane because she had also been the mistress of his hero Rossetti – and Rossetti had pursued her because he liked cuckolding his friends.

Suzanne Fagence Cooper’s aim in this joint biography is to demystify Jane Morris, give her a voice and a flesh-and-blood presence and show that William married her because he saw her ‘potential as an equal partner in his plans to make art and poetry’. What becomes clear, however, is that Morris considered no one his equal, least of all a woman. It seems more likely that he married her because, as he famously said, our homes should contain only those things that we ‘know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’ – and Jane was both of these.