In Their Own Words

The biography reexamines the relationship among Morris, his wife, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The author describes how Morris's childhood attachment to his sister became a lifelong obsession, the driving force in his poetry, and the cause of his failure in marriage.

Harold Bloom has written, "John Le Bourgeois ventures a radical reinterpretation of the marriage between William Morris and Jane Burden, whose adulterous relationship to Dante Gabriel Rossetti always has been mediated for us by his poems and paintings devoted to her. Le Bourgeois convincingly suggests that Morris himself was culpable, because of his repressed passion for his sister Emma. Le Bourgeois is responsible and poignant, and has altered my understanding of this tangled web."