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A protector by nature, Morris felt for women tenderness with hardly a hint of patronage. When he was at work on The Earthly Paradise he disliked writing about the thrashing of Psyche, and ‘was really glad to get it over.’ His care for his wife extended to her tedious sister, and his affection for his handicapped daughter, who got so dreadfully on Janey’s nerves, was described by Mackail as ‘the most touching element in his nature.’ Called upon for advice to a deserted lover, he suggested: ‘Think, old fellow, how much better it is that she should have left you, than that you should have tired of her, and left her.’

Tenderness and responsibility, of course, are not the same as understanding, still less a recognition of equality. It can be fairly said, however, that as soon as his own personality defined itself, Morris began to treat women as people. Quite certain, from his own experience, that pleasurable work was necessary to happiness, he tried to find out what they could do. Embroidery became, under his persuasion, their natural activity. It was a queen’s work, and also a peasant’s and guarded against the threat of idle or empty hands. Mary Nicholson, who kept house for Morris and Burne-Jones in the 1850s, was perhaps the first to learn. Morris stitched, she copied his stitches. ‘I seemed so necessary to him at all times,’ she said—this, if unconsciously, being part of the persuasion. During the early years of his marriage—‘a time to swear by,’ wrote Georgiana Burne-Jones, ‘if human happiness were doubted’—Morris and Janey worked together on English embroideries, unpicking old pieces to see how they were done. In the Seventies he admired and promoted the work of Catherine Holliday, who remembered that ‘when he got an unusually fine piece of colour he would send it off for me or keep it for me, and when he ceased to dye with his own hands I soon felt the difference.’

Yet Mrs Holliday and her skilled colleagues were for the most part executants rather than designers, and no better off in this respect than the ‘paintresses’ of the Potteries. This was a limitation of Morris’s own mind. Writing in 1877 to Thomas Wardle about a figure designer for high-warp tapestries, he says he has ‘no idea where to find such a man, and therefore I feel that whatever I do I must do chiefly with my own hands…a cleverish woman could do the greeneries, no doubt.’ On the administrative side, May took over the management of the embroidery section from 1885 onwards, but there was apparently never any suggestion that she should become a partner in the Firm.

There is not much evidence, in fact, of what Morris thought about women in the professions, or in public life. He worked, of course, side by side with them in the Movement, and made a strong protest at the arrest of Annie Cobden-Sanderson, but Mrs Besant tried him sorely not only, I think, on account of her Fabianism, but because she was Mrs Besant. By the time Georgie Burne-Jones entered local politics, ‘going like a flame’ through the village of Rottingdean, Morris had ceased to have much interest in ‘gas-and-water socialism,’ or in anything short of total change. In that same year (1884) he watched the haymakers, men and women both, distorted and ugly through overwork, and dreamed of the outright battle that would be needed to restore the fields to the labourers. But might he not, in any case, have agreed with Yeats that a woman in politics is a windy bellows? In an unpublished letter to Bruce Glasier he allowed himself some tart remarks about the Woman Question:

[B]ut you must not forget that childbearing makes women inferior to men, since a certain time of their lives they must be dependent on them. Of course we must claim absolute equality of condition between women and men, as between other groups, but it would be poor economy setting women to do men’s work (as unluckily they often do now) or vice versa.

Old Hammond, in News from Nowhere, undertakes to discuss it, but becomes evasive. There are no women members of Parliament in Nowhere, he says, because there is no Parliament.

Ruskin, in his strange treatise on woman’s education, Of Queen’s Gardens (1865), gives her the distinctive powers of ‘sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision,’ to which Morris would have added perspicacity and strength. That strength he greatly respected—he told his sister Isabella, who worked in the slums of South London, that she practised what he could only preach—and he depended perhaps more than he knew on his wife, and more than he could ever express on Georgie Burne-Jones. There is a confusion of viewpoints in the later poems and romances, where, as E. P. Thompson puts it, ‘the mournful Pre-Raphaelite ladies of earlier days have given way to maidens who can shoot with the bow, swim, ride, and generally do most things, including making love, a good deal more capably than their young men.’ In The Pilgrims of Hope the speaker, his wife, and his friend set out to join the Communards in besieged Paris, ‘we three together, and there to die like men.’ News from Nowhere depicts a land of effortless female superiority, and Ellen is the spirit of the earth itself and all that grows from it. On the other hand, in A Dream of John Ball, Will Green’s daughter is sent away from the skirmish and told to ‘set the pot on the fire, for that we shall need when we come home,’ and, to return to Nowhere, Mistress Philippa is an Obstinate Refuser, who works obsessively at her woodcarving although the men could manage without her (‘Could you, though?’ grumbled the last named from the face of the wall). It has to be admitted, also, that at the Guest House the comely women (however much Old Hammond tries to explain it away) are waitressing.

But Morris had dedicated himself, in the face of all discouragements and even of his own inconsistencies, to the transformation of human existence throughout the whole social order. Nothing less than this would do, ‘nor do I consider a man a socialist at all who is not prepared to admit the equality of women as far as condition goes.’ This last phrase sounds like a qualification, but Morris is as clear as spring-water in his condemnation of the marriage and property laws, which made women the slaves of slaves: ‘Whatever is unhappy is immoral. We desire that all should be free to earn their livelihood…with that freedom will come an end of these monstrosities, and a true love between man and woman throughout society.’

To his old friend Charlie Faulkner, who was exercised on the subject and wished to ‘blow off,’ Morris expanded his views a little. ‘Copulation is worse than beastly unless it takes place as the result of natural desire and kindliness on both sides.’ The divorce laws he saw as particularly hard on the poor, who were cooped together for good like fowls going to a market. In a true partnership husband, wife, and children would all be free, the children having their inalienable right of livelihood. A woman would not be considered ‘ruined’ if she followed a natural instinct, and separation would always be by consent, though Morris adds ‘I should hope that in most cases friendship would go along with desire, and would outlive it, and the couple would remain together, but always be free people.’

The most striking thing about this letter, written ten years before Morris’s death, is that he had married Jane Burden in 1859 with much the same convictions. There is no other way to explain the patience of this impatient man during the ‘specially dismal time’ from 1869 to 1873, when his marriage was at breaking point. Whatever the pain of it, Morris regarded Janey as a free agent, because he believed she was truly in love with another man, and love has a right to freedom, and, on the other side, a right to grant it. He left his wife to make her choice because anything else would have been ‘shabby,’ and twenty years later had not changed his mind. ‘A determination to do nothing shabby…appears to me to be the socialist religion, and if it is not morality I do not know what is.’

Contribution to William Morris Today (Catalogue for Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London), 1984

1The head of the Greek community in Victorian London was Constantine Ionides, ‘the Thunderer,’ a wealthy stockbroker and a generous patron of the arts. Mary Zambaco was a granddaughter of the House of Ionides, a wealthy beauty with ‘glorious red hair and almost phosphorescent white skin’ who had left her commonplace husband in Paris in 1866 and come to London. She was also a talented sculptress, with a temperament that Burne-Jones described as ‘like hurricanes and tempests and billows…only it didn’t do in English suburban surroundings.’ In 1868 he made his first attempt to break with her; she threatened to throw herself into the Regent’s Canal. In 1869 he painted her as Phyllis pleading with Demophoön, with the epigraph Dic mihi quod feci? nisi non sapienter amavi (Tell me what I have done, except to love unwisely). Rossetti was in their confidence, writing in 1869 to Jane Morris that Mary had become more beautiful ‘with all her love and trouble…but rainy walks and constant journeys are I fear beginning to break up her health.’

2H. de la Motte Fouqué. The Seasons: Four Romances from the German (English trans: 1843). Sintram and His Companions is the winter romance.