Into The Frame: The Four Loves of Ford Madox Brown
Chatto & Windus, forthcoming March 2010, with 86 illustrations, 16 in colour, £25.

Romantic and illuminating, Into the Frame is a vivid account of the public art and private demons of Ford Madox Brown, the finest but least understood of artists in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and the four central women in his life: his two wives and models, and his two secret loves.

Madox Brown, who grew up in France and Belgium before he came to England and won fame with paintings like The Last of England, was always an outsider, and the women he loved also burst out of stereotypes. His two wives, Elisabeth Bromley and Emma Hill, and his secret passions, the artist Marie Spartali and the author Mathilde Blind, were all remarkable personalities, from very different backgrounds. Their striving for self-expression, in an age that sought to suppress them, tells us much about women’s journey towards modern roles.

Elisabeth Bromley was born in 1818, the year Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; Marie Spartali died in 1927, a year before all women won the vote in England. Their lives – full of passion, sexual longing, tragedy and determination – take us from the English countryside and the artist’s studio to a Europe in turmoil and revolution. These are not silent muses hidden in the shadow of the ‘Master’. They step out of the shadows and into the picture, speaking with voices we can hear and understand.

Richly illustrated throughout, based on new research and written with verve and sympathy, this book is a rare opportunity to explore the life of a great artist and to enter a fascinating and neglected world of Victorian bohemianism.