Jane's Gap Year

The picture of course is not Jane but taken from a really interesting article
http://www.victorianlifestyle.org/?cat=14

When I was doing audits at work I was always told to 'follow the money'. Jane didn't like to talk about her early life - she told Philip Webb that her early life was not happy and refused Jack Mackail twice to include an engraving of Holywell Street in his biographer of Morris. After she left Oxford she seems hardly to have returned and didn't go to Mother's funeral. Her sister Bessie lived with the Morris' after her Father's death though.

Back to the money. She met Rossetti etc. when she was 17. As a working class lass (her Father was only a stable-hand) she would surely have been out at work - in service? Between meeting Morris and marrying there is a gap of over a year. Did she go to a Ladies Academy to become more refined and educated ? and did Morris pay ? Intriguing but there seem to be no clues.

Morris' mother a very middle-class matron, is interesting. What she thought of her son marrying Jane is not known but they seem to have got on well together and all holidayed together.