William Morris

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

An accomplished and original designer of textiles and furniture, books and typefaces, a socialist activist, poet and novelist (News from Nowhere), Morris (1834- 1896) had a ``magpie mind'' that sought expression in any number of media. MacCarthy (Eric Gill, a prize-winning biography of the sculptor), illuminates the paradoxes that shaped Morris's ``painfully heroic progress through life.'' Morris was a manufacturer of lush housewares who rejected his father as a ``capitalist villain''; an astringent critic of Victorian England who nearly became its poet laureate; a man both worldly and nave, stymied by his wife's affair with the charismatic Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris emerges in vivid snapshots as vital, protean and compassionate. This is the biography of a temperament-of a burgeoning reaction against late Victorian bourgeois complacency-that Morris shared with his friend painter Edward Burne-Jones, Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw and others. It also is shaped by interesting extended discussions-of the period's architecture, politics and literature-that sometimes distract from the account of the life they purportedly illuminate. Erudite, lavishly illustrated, including 24 pages of color, and absorbing, this is of interest for the amateur as well as the professional student of Victorian England. (Sept.)

Library Journal

"When William Morris was dying one of his physicians diagnosed his disease as `simply being William Morris and having done more than most ten men."' This was in part true of the driven man who was a poet, translator, publisher, businessman and retailer, medievalist, weaver, textile designer, political activist, early environmentalist, father of British Socialism, and guiding force behind the Arts and Crafts movement. With his complex versatility, Morris was an enigma to his Victorian contemporaries. Though there have been numerous works on different aspects of Morris's work, MacCarthy (Eric Gill, LJ 3/1/89) tackles the massive job of the complete story. Her five years of research show in her full and vivid understanding of the artist, the man, his friends, relatives, and era. Well illustrated, this work will serve as a worthy companion to Elizabeth Wilhide's book of Morris interiors, William Morris: Decor and Design (LJ 2/1/92), and the Gillian Naylor-edited William Morris, By Himself: Designs and Writings (New York Graphic Society, 1988). Highly recommended.-Joseph Hewgley, Nashville P.L.

Dennis Dodge

There are fine biographies of Morris already in print, beginning with J. W. Mackail's circumspect but perceptive authorized account, but MacCarthy's is certainly the definitive version of the life of one of the nineteenth century's most interesting and sympathetic figures. It is comprehensive and authoritative, with the added virtue of being entirely readable, even entertaining. Morris was an important poet and an influential designer, craftsman, fantasy novelist, and political thinker. He was also a very good man. It is in the context of his extraordinary range and scope--his well-roundedness--and of his profound feeling for humanity that MacCarthy's subtitle, "A Life for Our Time", makes sense. His life was by no means representative of our own narrowly specialized, selfish, and self-absorbed age, but it can serve as an antidote and an example. MacCarthy illuminates Morris' life in a more revealing and instructive light than anyone has done in the past or is likely to attempt in the future.