Pre-Raphaelite Anthology

BOOK REVIEWS injustice stemming from Edith's death accounts for the despairing themes of Atalanta in Calydon and Poems and Ballads. "The Triumph of Time," judged by Rooksby to be the best of all the poems, was inspired by Swinburne's disappointed love for Mary Gordon. AU in all this is an excellent book, about which I have only a couple of reservations, one of them a quibble, the other a complaint. The quibble is that the illustrations would be clearer if printed on glossy paper. Also, I do wish the photograph of Swinburne and Adah Menken had been included , especially since it is discussed in the text. And strictly by the way, why does the photograph of Colonel Disney Leith on page 108 show a left hand when we are told that he lost his left arm in battle? Is he wearing a prosthesis? Maybe a clearer picture would tell. The complaint is that the book is not long enough. While this could be construed as a compliment, what I mean is that some subjects call for more thorough development. Without it the reader cannot fully understand Swinburne's loathing of Louis Napoleon nor his disdain for Tennyson's poetry, to select two random examples. This biography is more accurate than Philip Henderson's Swinburne: The Portrait of a Poet (1974), but it is not more complete, on some topics even less so. Though not the definitive biography that still needs to be written, it is, as I have said, a very good one, which will be appreciated by Swinburne scholars for its new information and fresh insights , and by students as a reliable and readable introduction. Michael Bright ________________ Eastern Kentucky University Pre-Raphaelite Anthology An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings. Carolyn Hares-Stryker, ed. Washington Square:New York University Press, 1997. 391pp. Cloth$55 Paper$24.95 THE ERA of Pre-Raphaelite art has captivated the imagination of readers, critics, and scholars to a degree not necessarily warranted by the intrinsic artistic merit of any of its individual practitioners. The well-known events and personalities (the painting of the murals at Oxford , the personal enigma of Christina Rossetti, the affairs of Gabriel Rossetti, the exhumation of his manuscripts, the substance abuse, the tragic marriages of Ruskin, Morris, Rossetti, and Meredith, the bohemian life style at 16 Cheyne Walk and elsewhere) are, indeed, extraordinary —particularly so when set against the greater Victorian backdrop. These events—painterly and provocative—seem to have held special fascination for other artists (e.g. Elizabeth Savage's novel Willowwood, 459 ELT 41 : 4 1998 Ken Russell's 1969 film Dante's Inferno, John Fowles's alternative ending to The French Lieutenant's Woman, biographies of Christina Rossetti that read more like romances than scholarship, even Andrew Lloyd Weber 's obsession with Pre-Raphaelite paintings). The accomplishment of Carolyn Hares-Stryker's An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writings is that it manages, through selections from the primary texts alone, to come closer than any fiction, single memoir, or biography to representing the Pre-Raphaelite "circle" as a rich choir of conversations and personalities, always dominated by the "deep, full baritone" of Gabriel Rossetti's voice. I mean it only as a compliment that this anthology, with its few editorial impositions, is almost as successful as Russell's film in placing its characters seemingly simultaneously in the context they created for each other. But of course the virtue of the present anthology is that it is authentic, while Russell exploits the genuine strangeness of the subject with a heavy-handed and sensationalizing camera. The success of the anthology at creating this impression is a function of Hares-Stryker's sound editorial judgment at a number of critical points. Chief among these is her decision to divide the anthology into decades. Each section consists of the same generic arrangement of texts: "Letters and Memoirs," followed by "Literature," followed by "Reactions "; each offers a manageable look at a diverse group of individuals and their interactions within the decade. The ten-year spans favor the reader's memory by reintroducing the players sufficiently often to establish and maintain a narrative continuity. Another judicious decision was to begin every...