Book description
Their Bohemian lifestyle and intertwined love affairs
shockingly broke 19th Century class barriers and bent the rules that
governed the roles of the sexes. They became defined by love
triangles, played out against the austere moral climate of Victorian
England; they outraged their contemporaries with their loves,
jealousies and betrayals, and they stunned society when their complex
moral choices led to madness and suicide, or when their permissive
experiments ended in addiction and death. The characters are huge and
vivid and remain as compelling today as they were in their own time.
The influential critic, writer and artist John Ruskin was their father
figure and his apostles included the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti
and the designer William Morris. They drew extraordinary women into
their circle. In a move intended to raise eyebrows for its social
audacity, they recruited the most ravishing models they could find
from the gutters of Victorian slums. The saga is brought to life
through the vivid letters and diaries kept by the group and the
accounts written by their contemporaries. These real-lie stories shed
new light on the greatest nineteenth-century British art.
'Drama, romance and Victorian morality aplenty'
Franny Moyle has a degree in English and History of Art from St
John's College, Cambridge. She enjoyed a career in arts programming at
the BBC that culminated in her becoming the corporation's first
Commissioner for Arts and Culture. She is now a freelance executive
producer and writer as well as a director of the Hackney Empire, which
is near her home in East London. She is married and has three children.
