The Wayward Muse (29 page)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti
never fully recovered from his breakdown and his addiction continued. He and Jane remained warm friends until the end of his life. He died April 9, 1882. He was only fifty-three.

William Morris
was a poet, designer, and social reformer. During his life he was best known as the author of
The Earthly Paradise,
but we know him today as the father of the Arts and Crafts movement, which would inspire designers such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and continues to inspire today. He died October 3, 1896, age sixty-two. One doctor diagnosed the cause of death as “being William Morris, and having done more work than most ten men.”

Jenny Morris
was diagnosed with epilepsy, a shameful and untreatable condition at that time. Her condition slowly declined and all hopes for her future were destroyed. She required constant nursing care until her death in 1935.

May Morris
was an active Socialist, textile designer, and the editor of her father’s
Collected Works,
published in 1915. She died in 1938.

Jane Morris
lived quietly until her death in January 1914 at the age of seventy-four.

In historical fiction
, a writer begins with the facts. Jane Morris was born in Oxford, married William Morris in 1859, and had two daughters. So far, not very interesting. But here and there, tantalizing details crop up. At the parish school she attended, Jane was required to scour a room every Saturday to prepare for her likely career in domestic service. Dante Gabriel Rossetti kept a menagerie, including a kangaroo and a wombat, at his London house. William Morris often appeared at dinner blue to the elbows from his experiments with natural dyes. Distinct, fascinating personalities begin to emerge, and the desire wells up in me to know these people better. Biography is no longer enough. Since there is no way that I can join William Morris, Jane Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti for dinner at Red House, I have to imagine myself there. Since there is no way that William can pour out his heartache to me, or that Jane can share her doubts and fears about Rossetti’s health and their affair, I have to make that imaginative leap.

The novelist Jessamyn West once said, “Fiction reveals truths that reality obscures.” I believe that completely. There is a truth beyond the facts, and that is what I am constantly in search of.

Historical fiction transports the reader to another time and place. Granted, it is not Victorian England or Renaissance Florence as the people there experienced it. It is some strange amalgam of the historical record and the author’s mind. You may learn things about historical figures that you never knew, and that is part of the fun, but, most important, when you finish reading you feel as if you have met them. You feel that you know them, not just where they were born or when they married or how they died, but their essential self. It may be an illusion, but it is as close as we will ever get.

In imagining
The Wayward Muse, I have relied on
Jane Morris: The Pre-Raphaelite Model of Beauty,
by Debra N. Mancoff (Rohnert Park, Calif.: Pomegranate, 2000);
Pre-Raphaelites in Love,
by Gay Daly (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989);
Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood,
by Jan Marsh (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985);
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris: Their Correspondence,
edited and with an introduction by John Bryson (Clarendon Press, 1976);
Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
by Julian Treuherz, Liz Prettejohn, and Edwin Becker (London: Thomas & Hudson, 2003); and William Morris by Himself,
edited by Gillian Naylor (Little Brown, 2000). The story hews as closely to the facts as possible, though I am sure there are inadvertent inaccuracies, for which I ask your forbearance.