REVIEWS

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Keepers of the Flame

‘What makes Angela Thirlwell’s book so exceptionally interesting is the way it challenges the orthodox - and by now rather worn - biographical template…Thirlwell offers instead a series of soundings or, to use her phrase, “spots of experience” in William’s and Lucy’s lives. Thus there are discrete sections on William as a Victorian salary man; Lucy’s edgy relationship with her saintly sister-in-law Christina; William as art critic; Lucy as dying swan.

It is a testament to Thirlwell’s skill as a planner and grace as a writer that the narrative pulse of The Other Rossettis never weakens. Indeed, by side-stepping the requirement to plod day-by-day through her subjects’ lives, she manages to avoid much of that quotidian detail that can make reading biography such a slog. As a result, what might have been a so-what story about two Victorians with famous relatives becomes a wonderfully illuminating study of a whole slice of 19th-century cultural, social and intellectual life.’

Kathryn Hughes, The Guardian, 3 January 2004

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A Pre-Raphaelite Pairing

This study of William and Lucy Rossetti shows that biographies need not begin at the beginning…

'Angela Thirlwell's splendid Life of William and Lucy breaks the mould of biography. While traditional biography leans on the 19th-century novel for the narrative shape it gives to the lives of its subjects (the birth of the hero, his steady rise to greatness, his death and its aftermath), Angela Thirlwell has … arrang[ed] her dual portrait in themes…

This structure…"is intended to build up an impression of both lives by increments, rather than subscribing to the biographic fallacy that a Life, or in this case, two Lives, with all their fragmentary atoms of experience, can be artificially re-created as a fiction-like narrative, with significant structure, major turning-points and recurring patterns."

Various other biographers, notably Richard Ellmann in Yeats: The Man and the Mask, have done something similar, but none with quite the success of Thirlwell.

…With photographs and paintings reproduced on nearly every page (the book takes us) into an absorbing visual realm of Victorian photography and Pre-Raphaelite painting.

One of the tensions between Lucy and William Rossetti was that while he believed in the importance of art criticism as a means of understanding the historical and the literary life, "words for her could not explain the mystery of art". Thirlwell, like William, sees pictures as telling a story and interprets much of their marriage, indeed much of their lives, through her selection of pictures.

Thirlwell is a biographer who has thought about her art; she is particularly strong on the tangle of unconscious identifications and tensions between biographer and biographee. William and Lucy each wrote biographies, William of - among others - Shelley, and Lucy of the poet's novelist wife, Mary. While "Shelley was an aristocrat who thought like a radical; William was a sober civil servant who thought like an anarchist".

William and Lucy's own biographer has now made of their lives a challenging, unusual, and beautifully produced book.'

Frances Wilson, Sunday Telegraph, 19 October 2003

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The Forgotten Force Behind the Pre-Raphaelites

'Like the Brontës and the Bloomsbury group, the Rossettis are one of those creative constellations which exert an irresistible magnetism. Until now, studies of the family have focused on Christina, the pious, contemplative poet, and the bohemian artist Dante Gabriel…As this new book proves, [William] … was quite as extraordinary a character.

…in his spare time, [William] was the driving force behind, and chronicler of, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood … one of those amazing, energetic Victorians who found time to run several careers in parallel…

In addition to his civil service day job, William continued to exercise his talent for drawing - a stunning pencil sketch of Christina, both delicate and monumental, is among the illustrations here. In literature, he produced an avant-garde "realist" narrative poem about a real-life murder case which was much admired by Swinburne. Later, he wrote a life of Shelley, ahead of its time in its openness about sexual irregularities, and a translation of Dante's Inferno, remarkable for its direct simplicity. But it was as the country's foremost art critic that he developed most reputation…

William was uncompromisingly unconventional in outlook. His lack of religious belief marked him out from society and from the female members of his family. Interestingly, this agnosticism was shared by his wife Lucy, the joint subject of this biography, and a significant character in her own right. The daughter of the painter Ford Madox Brown, Lucy had been brought up in an artistic mileu and grew up an abrasive, intellectual character. As a young woman, she made an alluring impression, decked out in floppy aesthetic frocks, ethnic jewellery and - shockingly - make-up. Trained in her father's studio, she was a serious painter who produced a number of pictures on literary themes in the medieval Pre-Raphaelite style, good enough to be exhibited alongside those of better-known artists… Motherhood and illness - she battled for years with the tuberculosis that eventually killed her - prevented her from truly fulfilling her promise, but it is a testimony to William's feminism that he explicitly regretted this. If the stress of Lucy's illness took its toll on their marriage - in later years she sublimated her need for uncomplicated devotion in an obsessional friendship with a young gay poet - it is hardly surprising.

One of the joys of this biography, which is based on original research, is to be found in its illustrations. Photographs - from a gorgeous Julia Margaret Cameron portrait of William in aesthetic mode, to an intriguing image of Christina lounging in a polka-dotted dress - offer fascinating glimpses into past lives. But it is equally intriguing to see Lucy's artistic oeuvre, previously unacknowledged except by a few scholars…[which] show her negotiating her subjects from a specifically female perspective - a study from The Tempest, for example, puts Miranda very much in the dominant role in her chess game with Ferdinand.

Angela Thirlwell is admirably sensitive to the theoretical problems involved in writing biography…[her] account of William and Lucy manages to convince as a human portrait.'

Lucasta Miller, Daily Telegraph, 18 October 2003

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Dream Reading

"Angela Thirlwell's account of [William's] passionate marriage to the painter Lucy Madox Brown…provides a new perspective on an enlightened and politically radical Victorian couple. Thirlwell's unusual biography… prove[s] that these 'other Rossettis' were both 'of their times and ahead of them'."

SG, The Royal Academy of Arts Magazine, Autumn 2003

'…her study of these two vivid and engaging people is meticulously researched and magnificently illustrated…the picture which gradually and unemphatically emerges from its quiet, lucid pages is evocatively detailed and absorbing.

William and Lucy were 'both sharply illuminating alternative spirits of their age…as Thirlwell's excellent book makes clear…'

Rupert Christiansen, The Literary Review, November 2003

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The Friday Book - Victorians with a Modern Dimension

'Angela Thirlwell, in this original and engaging study, uncovers William's story…

"Victorians with a modern dimension", Thirlwell describes them. Her portrait of Lucy is as intense and delicately inflected as a Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Thirlwell presents these lives in an unusual way. She focuses on "spots of experience", on particular relationships or areas of activity….

Thirlwell's book...is a remarkable achievement, impeccably researched. What makes it additionally attractive are the illustrations which infiltrate the text. These include Lucy's little-known work and many hitherto unpublished drawings and photographs."

Frances Spalding, The Independent, 7 November 2003

‘In William and Lucy: The Other Rossettis, Angela Thirlwell employs meticulous assembly and sensitive analysis of archival sources to transcend the now banal genre of the Pre-Raphaelite marriage tale. In recounting the long-neglected ‘alliance of two major Pre-Raphaelite families, the Madox Browns and the Rossettis’, Thirlwell offers fresh insight into life within the Pre-Raphaelite circle. As the brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William is best remembered as the Pre-Raphaelite scribe. Thirlwell presents a lively portrait of an innovative critic, an early champion of women painters and Japanese art, who served on the jury of the first Venice Biennale (1895), all the while rising through the ranks of the Inland Revenue. She devotes similar attention to Lucy’s life as a working artist, far beyond the powerful influence of her father Ford. But it is the seemingly mundane details of the lives of these ‘atypical Victorians’ - as well as those of friends and family - that offer enlightenment. Drawing upon an extensive array of primary sources, Thirlwell constructs a vivid and vital world….the book provides such a wealth of insight and ideas - as well as a superb and surprising collection of illustrations - that the reader’s reward is a genuine acquaintance with these two fascinating people and their equally fascinating family and friends.’

Debra N Mancoff, The National Art Collections Fund Quarterly, Winter 2003

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Nineteenth-century art - Personalities with principles

‘[William fully repays the attention paid to him, a man with ideas and traits of character that are quite distinct from his siblings.

The term pre-Raphaelite is much abused, often attached to artists with no claims to it at all; but William Michael was actually a founding member of the Brotherhood…Lucy Madox Brown, William’s wife, was a daughter of the close associate of the pre-Raphaelite Brothers, Dante Gabriel’s intimate friend, Ford Madox Brown. Much of the real story of those brief pre-Raphaelite days emerges from this interesting book. Lucy herself was a painter with a reasonably promising career at the time of her marriage aged 30 - one great bonus of this volume is to have all her surviving works rounded up and reproduced in colour…However, the focus is on the marriage of William and Lucy, and the detail is reserved for their deeply touching relationship, a contrast with Gabriel’s marital shenanigans. The author has chosen an unconventional approach, inspired, as she points out by Lytton Strachey: the image of the biographer lowering a “little bucket” into the narrative depths of the subject’s experience is his. This is a serious and substantial work, drawing on wide-ranging archival sources for its previously unpublished information…The book ranges through conventional biography, social, cultural and medical history…there is no question that this double biography fills a gap - many gaps - in the story of the Rossetti family and the artistic environment in which their achievements flourished.’

Charlotte Gere, The Art Newspaper, No.143, January 2004 Book Review

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‘One of the great strengths of this double biography of William Michael Rossetti and his artist wife, Lucy, daughter of Ford Madox Brown, is the amount of hitherto unpublished images the author has tracked down, of and by her protagonists, as well as by their family and friends. For example, the first chapter - which explores the characters of William and Lucy through over thirty portraits ranging from about 1840 to 1913 - reproduces sketches of William by Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes, Millais and Christina Rossetti, together with an important plaster bas-relief of 1869 by John Lucas Tupper.

In 1994 the National Portrait Gallery’s centenary exhibition on Christina Rossetti reunited the portraits made on 12th April 1853 by the Pre-Raphaelites for their fellow PRB Thomas Woolner. No drawing by William Michael was included: indeed, he has long been regarded as the one non-artistic member of the Brotherhood. However, his brother Dante Gabriel recorded than on that occasion, ‘William did the whole lot of us in his own striking style’. One of William’s sheets, a double-sided portrait of Millais and Holman Hunt, survives in an Australian private collection, and is reproduced here. Thirlwell also illustrates nineteen of his other drawings, ranging from portraits and caricatures to meticulous studies that demonstrate William’s strong commitment to the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of truth to nature. And in a sense he remained a Pre-Raphaelite, committed to this principle in his biographical writings.

The most immediately striking and novel aspect of Thirlwell’s book is its thematic structure, which ‘is intended to build up an impression of both lives by increments’, since biography ‘cannot reanimate dead subjects exactly as they once lived’ (p.1.). The author is as interested in the personalities of William and Lucy as in their achievements, and has been able to present an intimate portrait of their lives and marriage by skilfully marshalling her sources, quoting extensively from the enormous amount of manuscript material which survives thanks to William’s indefatigable record keeping.

William successfully pursued a career at the Board of Inland Revenue. He had joined the Civil Service at the age of fifteen, and the work, which he never found congenial, enabled him to support the entire Rossetti family. While he has long been seen as an enabler, Thirlwell expands our knowledge of this cosmopolitan with radical views, whose prolific output as an art critic and man of letters she relates to his lack of belief in an afterlife…

Lucy is one of the few Victorian women artists to have been accorded an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography. In 1889, as a signatory to a declaration in favour of women’s suffrage, she described herself as a ‘historical painter’. This defines most of her exhibited work, but after her marriage in 1874 her short career was submerged by her fierce commitment to the upbringing and education of her five children. She did not give up painting entirely, however, as is demonstrated by the previously unpublished watercolours of Broadstairs and Charmouth, which Thirlwell illustrates in colour.

In 1890 Lucy contributed an article on her father to the Magazine of Art, which defined art as ‘the noble inspirations of genius…that is only handed from artist to artist’. This is revealing in terms of her own artistic output, which has always been seen as deeply indebted to her teacher-father’s example. Thirlwell illustrates a charming copy Lucy made in 1870 of her father’s Jacopo Foscari in Prison…Lucy certainly had an individual voice: two of her exhibited works, the highly accomplished Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess (1871) and Margaret Roper rescuing the head of her father, Sir Thomas More from London Bridge (1873), in their depictions of dominant women, can be seen as feminist statements.’

Judith Bronkhurst, The Burlington Magazine, January 2004 TLS Review

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'Thirlwell has uncovered a good deal of information - about the Rossetti family, about illness, work and social life - and she paints a convincingly sympathetic picture of a troubled marriage, which was cut short by Lucy's death from consumption.…it is perhaps thanks to [William's] steady documentation that Dante Gabriel Rossetti has been preserved as a Victorian painter for the twenty-first century'.