Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture Series Editor: Julian Wolfreys Drawing on provocative research, volumes in the series provide timely revisions of the nineteenth-century's literature and culture. Jane Morris The Burden of History Wendy Parkins The first scholarly appraisal of Jane Morris, muse and icon of Victorian art This new study argues that the enduring myth of Jane Morris - as a passive invalid, femme fatale and melancholy beauty - has derived from the continued circulation of selective anecdotes and recollections by contemporaries that reduced a complex historical figure to a limited set of traits and failed to acknowledge the significance of class mobility in her life. Examining textual representations - letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies - as well as handiwork and other material objects, Wendy Parkins shows how the myth of Jane Morris - as the wife of William Morris and the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - has disguised her agency and capacity for creative collaboration. Drawing on recent understandings of class and gender in subject formation, together with theorisations of myth, narrative and character in life-writing, Parkins offers a radical re-interpretation of Jane Morris that attends closely to the contradictions of class and gender in Victorian modernity. Wendy Parkins is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Kent. She is the author of Mobility and Modernity in Women's Novels, 1850s-1930s (2009) and the editor of William Morris and the Art of Everyday Life (2010).