Pre-Raphaelites in love /

Behind the dreamlike women in Pre-Raphaelite paintings stood the artists' flesh-and-blood models with whom they often became romantically involved. Dante Gabriel Rossetti transformed shopkeeper Elizabeth Siddal into his saintly Beatrice and slept with barmaid Annie Miller. By marrying teenaged Jane Burden, William Morris tried to seize hold of one of the medieval maidens in his paintings; he projected grace, charm, uncanny wisdom onto her shyness, but she felt emotionally trapped and the marriage broke down. Daly, who has taught women's studies, presents an often touching, sometimes hilarious, always engrossing portrait of the high-minded Victorian Brotherhood, their romances and their almost incestuous cross-connections. The men do not come off well: William Holman Hunt's arrogant attempt to remake flirtatious Annie Miller into a well-read lady reminds one of the Pygmalion-Galatea myth. John Ruskin trivialized and condescended to his wife Effie Gray; she later married sexually demanding John Everett Millais, who made her a breeder in an endless round of pregnancies. This is amorous biography at its witty, perceptive best. Illustrated. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The Pre-Raphaelite painters' enigmatic relationships with their models are among the more romantic legends of the Victorian art world, and Daly here recounts some of their well-known and occasionally entangled affections. For the most part, she concentrates on the women's perspective, but her narrative all too often falls prey to the more dynamic personalities of the painters. Not all of Daly's storytelling is even-handed: key elements in the tragedy of Elizabeth Siddal and new evidence about Jane Morris's attitudes are glossed over. Since the Pre-Raphaelites and their paintings are popular icons of 19th-century British culture, the book is a suitable acquisition for public libraries that do not already have Jan Marsh's The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood ( LJ 10/1/85), which covers most of the same ground.-- Paula A. Baxter, NYPL (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Here, drawing from original diaries and letters, Daly (a scholar of women's studies) examines the artistic accomplishments and romantic entanglements of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The sexual adventures of the Brotherhood--Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris--were apparently exclusively heterosexual, but not conventional or uncomplicated. Rossetti was involved for years with Jane Morris; Millais' wife, Effie, had previously contracted an unconsummated marriage with John Ruskin. Rossetti's wife may have committed suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum on discovering that her husband preferred his model/mistress. Though the convolutions of these relationships are quite complex, Daly succeeds in keeping her narrative clear, and is particularly astute in delving into the attitude of the period towards women. Take, for example, her analysis of the Victorian artistic convention of using an upper-class woman's head superimposed on a working-class woman's body when depicting a nude figure. As Daly points out, this practice captures in a startling way male attitudes toward the social levels of women at the time: ""respectable"" women being all intellect, lower-class women all flesh. An engrossing survey/group-biography of an artistic movement now receiving greater appreciation and understanding. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.