Book Review : The Legacy of 5 Eminent Victorians

Pre-Raphaelites in Love by Gay Daly (Ticknor & Fields: $24.95; 468 pages)

No other way but to begin this review of the lives and loves of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood--that high-living group of artistic, English aesthetes who thrived under the reign of Queen Victoria--with three unaesthetic, unmatching truisms:

(1) The shelf-life of an American book right now is the same as a carton of boysenberry yogurt--three months. The publication date of this book was in January, so if you want it, you’ll probably have to order it. Is it worth the trouble? Yes, yes, yes.

(2) American publishing is like a night in Las Vegas--one big metaphysical roulette wheel. Thus, Brenda Maddox, who wrote the biography of Nora, James Joyce’s wife, last year, won deserved renown and fame. Diane Johnson’s “Lesser Lives” (about wives of famous Victorian men), established the foundation of Johnson’s fine career. On the other hand, “Pre-Raphaelites in Love” (about Victorian wives of famous artists), a brilliant work, seems to have come and gone, virtually unnoticed. The only explanation is: There is no explanation! American publishing is a roulette wheel.

(3) Compared to America, England is a very small country. Throw in the boundaries of the class system, and the fact that in the 19th Century there were only two universities worth going to, and you get the effect of a society about the size of a public high school in the San Fernando Valley: British Empire High. Beyond any interest you or your friends might have in the Pre-Raphaelites in particular, this book is a perfect handbook to Victorian times in England, and the way that people related in their very small world. When you got sick, you went to a nursing home set up by Florence Nightingale. When your rebellious daughter fell in love, it might be with George Bernard Shaw. If someone’s little nephew drifted by, it was probably Rudyard Kipling. . . .

Convenient Oversight

A UCLA student of mine (she went on, still not getting to the actual subject matter here), interrupted me just this semester as I spoke of romance: “But what you remember is from the Fifties ,” she chided. “That was when people didn’t sleep with each other until they got married.” How convenient it is for us to forget the sexuality of our ancestors! But as Gay Daly reminds us, writing about the 1850s, “we imagine that we have freed ourselves from the baggage of the Victorian world, and in some ways no doubt we have, but . . . its myths of romance and marriage are still embedded in our consciousness and they have great power over us--greater, in fact, when we refuse to acknowledge them.”

This book is about five amazingly successful Victorian artists, those “Pre-Raphaelites” who gave us a series of willowy, sensual, mythic female beauties whose cheapened descendants we see on the covers of a thousand sci-fi paperbacks today. It is also about the women who modeled for those mythic pictures, and who ended up marrying (or pining away for) those artists. But what this book is really about is us. In weaving together the lives of John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris with the women who posed for them, married them and died for them, the author has come up with a thorny wreath--a mirror image of the crown of thorns we all wear today.

These men were youth-obsessed; they had to be, their careers as artists depended upon it. They hated to get married and feared sex, but when they got a taste, they became sex fiends!

The women, denied the possibility of jobs, could look forward to lives as spinsters, whores or wives. Prescription drugs abounded: two people in this book die of overdoses. Couples searched in vain for contraceptive information but had to settle for unwanted pregnancies. Men had nervous breakdowns rather than face their domestic responsibilities. Everyone was in love with somebody else, most of the time. And yet these artists lived long, productive lives. And with two exceptions, their wives survived them.

Sex and Elegance

Love, sex, style, elegance, wit, adventure--all of that is in these pages. A wife who is still a virgin after six years of marriage! A childbirth so horrendous that an 11-pound baby must be “wrestled out,” and emerges with a black eye and a broken arm! It used to be hard, as a student of English Lit, not to dismiss the Pre-Raphaelites as a group of sickly guys summed up in 25 pages of somebody’s tissue-paper anthology. But never again, not after you’ve read this hypnotic, intelligent, sensational book.