The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination by Fiona MacCarthy (review)

In her noteworthy new biography of Edward Burne-Jones, the first to be published in over thirty-five years, Fiona MacCarthy has crafted a compellingly written and expertly researched account of the Victorian artist’s life, loves, and labors. From his humble birth in industrial Birmingham to the distinction of a memorial service in Westminster Abbey, MacCarthy frames Burne-Jones’s story as a quest in keeping with the chivalric tales he so often portrayed in his own work. Charting her tale spatially as well as chronologically, MacCarthy follows in Burne-Jones’s footsteps, immersing the reader in the artist’s world, while vividly animating his diverse social circle and their various haunts with vibrant and thoughtfully delineated detail. And yet, through the accumulation of these striking vignettes, the figure that emerges in MacCarthy’s narrative is not quite a heroic one. Acknowledging “Burne-Jones’s innate resistance to biography,” MacCarthy evidently struggles at times with what she perceives to be the artist’s perverse nature (xxi). After completing her triumphant biography of Burne-Jones’s lifelong friend and working partner William Morris in 1994, William Morris: A Life for Our Time, MacCarthy was already deeply conversant with the archives of their shared lives. Indeed, this book is less an independent volume than the second half of a whole, and the two men naturally manifest as foils, Morris the strident social reformer and pioneer of modern design, and Burne-Jones the willowy aesthete and painter of escapist reveries.

In contrast to the solidity and earnestness of Morris, Burne-Jones is, by MacCarthy’s account, frustratingly mercurial and elusive. In her estimation, Burne-Jones “was the greater artist although Morris was unarguably the greater man” (xxii). A subtle impatience particularly with the artist’s sexual foibles seeps into MacCarthy’s prose. Much like the Arthurian enchanter in his painting The Beguiling of Merlin (1873–74), Burne-Jones is depicted as a man riddled with insecurities and desperate to be loved, enthralled by one lovely woman after another. Using letters from newly accessible troves in private collections, MacCarthy fleshes out the areas of his personal life that Georgiana Burne-Jones, the artist’s wife and author of the magisterial, two-volume Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones (1904), was unable or unwilling to discuss. This biography, therefore, sheds new light on his succession of passionate, extramarital attachments to a series of women, including his scandalous affair with the Greek sculptor Maria Zambaco, as well as his ardent but presumably chaste infatuations with Frances Horner (née Graham) and Helen Mary Gaskell, among others. While Georgie Burne-Jones resolutely resigned herself to becoming a companion and manager of sorts to her husband in middle age, one muse after another paraded through the artist’s heart in a gathering of women that mirrors Edward Burne-Jones’s painting The Golden Stairs (1880). This work, which MacCarthy previously described as his “lascivious assemblage of dream women,” incorporates several portraits of his darlings, seemingly corroborating the artist’s real-life obsessiveness (William Morris [Faber and Faber, 1994], xiv). These secretive passions, with their suggestion of repressed Victorian sensuality, are the ideal fodder for the biographer and make for a compelling read. However, such psycho-sexual preoccupation with Burne-Jones’s hidden desires obscures the true radical quality of his work.

If Burne-Jones’s many affairs of the heart are tantalizing, but ultimately insubstantial, it is because the great true love of his life was Morris and the work they pursued together with united ardor from their first meeting as Oxford undergraduates to their deaths just two years apart. The diminished treatment of their inseparable bond is an unexpected and significant shortcoming of this otherwise fine biography. In her preface, MacCarthy remarks that one of her primary motivations is to disentangle the two men’s lives and careers, thereby staking a new claim for Burne-Jones apart from the robust...