William Morris and Red House

The present extract is taken, with thanks, from Jan Marsh, The Pre-Raphaelites ( p54-55), 1998, NPG

'It was hard to find a weakness in that small lovely personality. To look into her clear eyes was to see to the very bottom of her candid soul,' wrote her obituarist. Many besides grandchildren were awed by the penetrating, albeit silent, judgement of eyes that Morris called 'the deep grey windows of her heart'.

Daughter of a Methodist minister, Georgiana Macdonald was 19 when she married Edward Burne-Jones.' I wish it were possible to explain the impression made upon a young girl whose experience so far had been quite remote from art, by sudden and close intercourse with those to whom it was the breath of life,' she wrote of her introduction to the Pre-Raphaelite circle, where she was known and loved as 'Georgie'.

'There is a young person named Georgie, Whose life is one profligate orgy' began Rossett's limerick, as remote from accuracy as possible. But she loved music and received art tuition from Madox Brown, recalling that in early married life she thought 'it quite natural that in the middle of the morning I should ask our only maid to stand for me that I might try to draw her'. Motherhood intervened, however, and though Georgie's steady gaze is seen in several of Burne-Jones's canvases, such as King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid, family affairs claimed her attention. Her nephews included Rudyard Kipling and future Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Her grandaughter became the novelist Angela Thirkell.

Tiny in stature, she was called 'Mignon' by her good friend George Eliot, who wrote: 'Your words of affection are very dear to my remembrance...the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.'

Close also to William Morris, Georgie assisted her son-in-law with the first biography of Moris. She helped found the South London Art Gallery and late in life became a community representative at her home in Sussex. 'She is busy - she is rousing the village - she is marching about - she is going like a flame through the village,' wrote her husband. In widowhood, she triumphed with Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, which also commemorates her own life and ideals.