William morris biography book

  • This is Fiona MacCarthy''s

    • William Morris: A Life for Our Time

    February 13,
    Morris is first sent to school at nine years old, riding the two-mile journey on the same pony he would later take on excursions around Epping Forest. Marlborough next, Morris now aged fourteen. It’s lawless and violent there - the schoolboys, feral brats of upper-middle class Anglican clergymen, pelt stones at passing farmers and skin wild animals in Savernake Forest, a more cultivated Epping. Morris hides out in it, exploring churches and ancient burial-mounds, weaving nets. At Oxford, Morris is intended for the Church, but rails against Anglicanism. He and Burne-Jones edge closer to Catholic doctrine, drawing on the recent Tractarian disputes, and gain an interest in the Gothic revival as a rejuvenation of medieval Christianity. With Burne-Jones Morris has ‘his first real friendship’ (p), and a real group of friends also - they read Shakespeare, Tennyson, Keats and Wordsworth to each other, and write poetry themselves. Both Morris and Burne-Jones imagine becoming part of a celibate, sacred brotherhood devoted to art and worship - they discover Ruskin and the Pre-Raphelites, and Morris starts sketching architectural forms. Oxford’s stifling academic atmosphere bores him - he is impatient for something else.

    He visits Northern France, entranced by the same cathedrals that fascinated Ruskin: Amiens, Chartres, Beauvais, Rouen - colossal masterpieces of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century architecture. It’s here that he finally decides to give up the road towards the cloth - his mother is furious. He finishes at Oxford and is taken on as a pupil by the imposing Gothic architect G.E. Street, which initially allowed him to stay in Oxford. The day-to-day confines of architectural surveying and draughtsmanship, as well as Street’s relatively conservative style, meant immediate disillusionment, although a fortunate new friendship with Street’s clerk, Philip Webb.

    Next to London with Street’s office, living with Burne-
  • In this biography, Fiona MacCarthy

    • WILLIAM MORRIS

    Morris's life of Pre-Raphaelite/Nordic poetry, medievalist arts and crafts, and socialist politics always makes for a readably overstuffed biography, and MacCarthy (Eric Gill, , etc.) addresses each area knowledgeably and stays sympathetic to her hero. As a paragon of both taste and the Left, Morris inspired much hero-worship that carried over into biographies embarrassed by their paradoxical subject: an uncategorizable craftsman innovating through traditionalism, a Socialist and a businessman, a cuckold by his friend and fellow poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. MacCarthy clearheadedly avoids both the hero worship and the embarrassment, keeping up with both his gradual political transformation from neo-Gothic bohemian to committed if idiosyncratic socialist, and his wide-ranging work in architecture, stained-glass, furniture, textiles, printing, et al. MacCarthy's biography takes its personal cue from Morris as a young Oxford student, desperate for camaraderie to direct his energies (even at the price of being ``Topsy,'' his nicknamed buffoonish persona). Topsy's midlife conversion to socialism surprised his Oxford friends, but MacCarthy makes this maturation understandable and keeps his aesthetic and social ideals unblurred. She also paints a deep emotional portrait of Morris's family relations, especially with his daughters, the worshipful May and the invalid Jenny. Unfortunately, she leaves his wife, Janey, at the fastidious distance she cultivated and villainizes Rossetti, who despite his philandering had a complex relationship with Morris. MacCarthy delicately probes other sensitive aspects of his life but partially neglects Morris's personal depths. The volume is illustrated with his best-known creations and rarer ones, as well as everything from cartoons by Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones to socialist handbills and Kelmscott lettering. A well-crafted labor of love, MacCarthy's biography chronicles the epic works of a man who inspired both Shaw

    William Morris: A Life for Our Time

    Winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and described by as &#;one of the finest biographies ever published&#;, this is Fiona MacCarthy&#;s magisterial biography of William Morris, legendary designer and father of the Victorian Arts and Crafts movement.

    &#;Thrilling, absorbing and majestic.&#; Independent
    &#;Wonderfully ambitious &#; The definitive Morris biography.&#; Sunday Times
    &#;Delicious and intelligent, full of shining detail and mysteries respected.&#; Daily Telegraph
    &#;Oh, the careful detail of this marvellous book! . . . A model of scholarly biography&#;. New Statesman

    Since his death in , William Morris has been celebrated as a giant of the Victorian era. But his genius was so multifaceted and so profound that its full extent has rarely been grasped. Many people may find it hard to believe that the greatest English designer of his time &#; possibly of all time &#; could also be internationally renowned as a founder of the socialist movement, and ranked as a poet with Tennyson and Browning.

    In her definitive biography &#; insightful, comprehensive, addictively readable &#; the award-winning Fiona MacCarthy gives us a richly detailed portrait of Morris&#;s complex character for the first time, shedding light on his immense creative powers as artist and designer of furniture, fabrics, wallpaper, stained glass, tapestry, and books; his role as a poet, novelist and translator; on his psychology and his emotional life; his frenetic activities as polemicist and reformer; and his remarkable circle of friends, literary, artistic and political, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. It is a masterpiece of biographical art.

    You are about to enter the page
    ID: , Your IP Address:
    Timestamp: Wed, 19 Feb UTC
    No worries, this is just a security precaution.