Enough Love to Last Out a Long Life

I've had an interesting weekend of pursuing various matters to do with Edward Burne-Jones, which is always a pleasure.  I am very much looking forward to going up to Liverpool this summer to see the exhibition at the Lady Lever Gallery and part of me is hoping that I will learn a little more about the artist and his wife.  I am beginning to find Georgiana rather fascinating, not least because it is through her that we have the Memorials, his biography which he feared so much, hence the reason he entrusted it to Georgiana.  After all, Edward Burne-Jones had no greater supporter.

Georgiana Burne-Jones (1882) Frederick Hollyer

Georgiana, or Georgie as she was more usually called, was one of the MacDonald sisters who all managed to marry spectacularly talented men and/or produce talented children.  To state the obvious, these were astonishingly smart women in their own right and from the sisters, Agnes, Georgiana, Louisa and Alice we have Kiplings, Baldwins and marriages to Edward Burne-Jones and Edward Poynter.  That is being connected.

Agnes Poynter (nee MacDonald) (1867) Edward Poynter

Alice Kipling (1860s)

Louisa Baldwin (1868) Edward Poynter

Georgie and her family moved frequently during her childhood with her father's work as a Methodist minister, until they settled back in Birmingham in 1850. Harry MacDonald, Georgie's brother, attended King Edward's School which made him part of an artistic set to which he introduced his sisters.  Among his fellow students was Edward or 'Ned' Jones, who was destined for the church.  Georgie and Ned fell in love when she was barely a teenager and there was already an attachment between them when the MacDonalds moved to London in 1853, when Georgie was 13.  Moving down to university, Ned had a fateful meeting with a fellow Oxford undergraduate, William Morris, and the young men decided to alter their course from church to easel.

Georgie in 1856, at the time of her engagement

Georgie's friendship with Ned led to an engagement when she was 15, although Ned (who had adopted 'Burne' to his surname) had little prospect of marrying her, which caused both of them distress.  Georgie's support of her fiancee brought her into the Pre-Raphaelite circle, including the great John Ruskin, an experience that affected her deeply, as she said "I wish it were possible to explain the impression made upon me as a young girl whose experience so far had been quite remote from art, by sudden and close intercourse with those to whom it was the breath of life... I felt in the presence of a new religion."  Georgie herself attended art school (although she dismissed her time there later in life) and studied a little under Ford Madox Brown.  Very little of her work seems to exist, which is a shame as she showed talent and delicacy in her work.

Dead Bird (1857) Georgiana MacDonald

Woodcut Georgiana MacDonald

Georgiana Burne-Jones (1860) D G Rossetti

Ned and Georgie finally married in 1860 and had only £30 to their joint name, but by all accounts they were blissfully happy.  Summers were spent with William and his new bride Jane, in somewhat more affluent surroundings, and with Georgie's married sisters and their families.  In Green Summer, Burne-Jones shows a circle of women, including his sisters-in-law and Jane Morris, listening as Georgie reads aloud.  I think that it is interesting how singular she looks, that even amongst this circle of talented women his wife is exceptional.  Part of what made her so special in his eyes had been the trials they had been through in the first few years of their marriage.  Georgie had given birth to Philip in the Autumn of 1861 but in the summer of 1864, Philip caught scarlet fever, passing it to his pregnant mother.  Georgie gave premature birth to their second son Christopher, who died soon afterwards.  Georgie was ill for some time afterwards, then refused to return to the rooms where Christopher had died.  By showing her in black, Ned may have been alluding to their tragedy, but I feel that the other women are listening to her because Ned feels she has gained wisdom from her experiences, however painfully won.

Green Summer (1864) Edward Burne-Jones

After the birth of their second child, Margaret, the couple finally settled in Fulham, where they would live for a while.  1866 brought both the joy of Margaret's birth, but also the arrival of Maria Zambaco into Ned's life after her mother commissioned a portrait from him.  Ned's affair with Maria caused his wife a great amount of pain, yet somehow she clung to the faith he would not leave her entirely, "I know one thing, and that is that there is enough love between Edward and me to last out a long life if it is given us".  That faith must have been greatly shaken by the very public event of Maria's attempted suicide, but somehow the Burne-Jones family remained intact.

The Morris and Burne-Jones families at Kelmscott, 1874

Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that Georgie became close to William Morris.  Already like family due to the 'brotherhood' shared by Ned and William, when their spouses strayed Georgie and William had an added bond which was to last for the rest of their lives.  It is suggested that Morris' poetry of the late 1860s and 1870s suggests that he wanted her to leave Ned for him, but steadfastly she remained by her erring husbands side.  The families spend time together again, like they had in the early years of their marriages, and photographs exist of summers at Kelmscott in the 1870s.

Georgiana Burne-Jones (1881) Blanche F MacArthur

The Burne-Jones family move from London to Rottingdean in Sussex in 1880 seems to mark a break from the trouble and interference of London.  Rossetti's death in 1882 affected Ned greatly but Georgiana found their more 'isolated' life in the village suited her and enabled her to get involved in matters back in London, such as the South London Fine Art Gallery which brought fine art education to the working-classes, but from a safe distance.  

Georgiana Burne-Jones and family (1883) Edward Burne-Jones

The Family (1880s) Edward Burne-Jones

Although Burne-Jones strayed again in the early 1890s with one of his daughter's friends, May Gaskell, Ned's relationships with the many young women who went in and out of the Burne-Jones home never went beyond flirtation.  Georgiana must have remained ever watchful of the young girls who came, giggling, to view the artist, growing increasing white and wistful, but everso full of romance.  Ned maintained a spirit of other-worldliness, his attachment to his daughter and some of her circle boardering on a mania at times.  Although he could not bare to be parted from Margaret, his obvious pleasure at being a grandfather is so touching in the photographs of him with the tiny children, climbing him like an old but sprightly tree...

Ned and his grandchildren

Against her wishes and in the face of ridicule from some of their closest friends, Georgiana found herself Lady Burne-Jones when Ned accepted a baronetcy in 1894, mainly to enable his son to inherit the title.  I find the lack of support shown by their friends to be astonishing, but possibly all bad feeling was lost in the wake of Morris' death in 1896.  Ned was devastated  but you can only assume what Georgiana must have felt as Morris had been her truest friend and supporter.  Ned declined in health until his own death only two years later.  Before he died, he asked his wife to be his official biographer, possibly fearing revelations that could damage not only his reputation but also the future prospects of his wife and children.

Georgie Burne-Jones in later life

Alone in Rottingdean, Georgie became more intellectually active than ever.  While working on her husband's Memorials and The Flower Book, she also became more political,  protesting against the Boer War.  After the Relief of Mafeking, she hung a banner from the windows of her house saying "We have killed and also take possession".  Her nephew Rudyard Kipling had to persuade her to take it down in order to pacify the outraged villagers. She finally died in 1920 at the age of 80.  Philip, who became a painter like his father, died in 1926 and Margaret, who was the mother of the novelists Angela Thirkell and Denis Mackail (the children in the photo with their grandfather, above) died in 1953.

Despite, or maybe because of the feyness and flirtation of her husband, Georgiana Burne-Jones remains one of those figures who had to be the still place amongst the madness. I get the impression that because of Georgie's stability, Ned could drift away, but you have to wonder at the cost to his wife.  Certainly she kept an iron grip on his memory into the twentieth century, honoring his wishes with a tenacious spirit.  I would like to know more about Georgie because I suspect there is more to know.