One evening in March 1869, Henry James visited William and Jane Morris in their rooms over Morris’s London shop. It was, James told his sister Alice, a “long, rich sort of visit, with a strong peculiar flavor of its own”—and not one that he wished to repeat. The peculiar flavor came from the long, strong body of Jane Morris.
“Oh, ma chère, such a wife! Je n’en reviens pas—she haunts me still.” James saw the muse of the age as a ghost, shadowed in the morbid eclipse of art.
A figure cut out of a missal—out of one of Rossetti’s or Hunt’s pictures—to say this gives but a faint idea of her, because when such an image puts on flesh and blood, it is an apparition of fearful and wonderful intensity. It’s hard to say whether she’s a grand synthesis of all the Pre-Raphaelite pictures ever made—or they a “keen analysis” of her—whether she’s an original or a copy. Imagine a tall, lean woman in a long dress of some dead purple stuff, guiltless of hoops (or of anything else I should say) with a mass of crisp black hair heaped into great wavy projections on each of her temples, a thin pale face, a pair of strange sad, deep dark Swinburnian eyes, with great thick black oblique brows, joined in the middle and tucking themselves away under her hair, a mouth like the “Oriana” in our illustrated Tennyson, a long neck, without any collar,
