May Morris shared her father’s passion for flowers, embroidery and Iceland, but was much more than William’s daughter. Influential both as a designer and as a teacher, she championed the rights of workers, particularly women, as Huon Mallalieu reveals
AS the daughter of William Morris, poet, painter, designer, printer, socialist campaigner, businessman, utopian and driving force of the Arts-and-Crafts Movement, May Morris still has not entirely escaped from his wide-spreading shadow. Much of his poetry has not worn well and, after his death in 1896, his designs fell out of fashion, to be replaced by Art Nouveau and Art Deco. Since the relaunch of his wallpapers and fabrics by Sandersons and Liberty in the 1960s, however, his reputation has risen again and hers with it. Indeed, a similar string of labels can be attached to her— designer, art embroiderer, teacher, writer, political activist, historian, socialist and supporter of women’s advancement—and, since the 1980s, not only her contribution to her father’s success, but her own achievements, too, have been increasingly understood.
In 1861, a year before May’s birth, Morris had set up Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co to make ecclesiastical and domestic furnishings by traditional methods. From the start, May and her elder sister, Jenny, were brought up surrounded by artists and craftspeople— at that time, the ‘& Co’ were Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and Philip Webb—and soon learned the discipline of standing as models. The glass-painting workshop was next door from their home and the main business premises only yards away. Their mother, Jane, and aunt, Elizabeth Burden, worked at embroideries, such as altar cloths, wall-hangings and screens, and the girls were soon stitching small items for sale.
Both girls were expected to fly high, Jenny as a writer and May as an artist. From 1871, they spent their summers at Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, on its backwater of the upper Thames, where they enjoyed remarkable freedom for the time, and May developed the love of Nature and habit of sketching that were to be so important in her career as a designer. It was hoped that
Jenny might go to Cambridge, until she was increasingly incapacitated by the onset of epilepsy. May, however, enrolled at what later became the Royal College of Art in South Kensington in London, where her special subject was embroidery, with an eye to the extraordinary achievements of medieval England known as Opus Anglicanum. Morris’s father had been managing partner of one of the top City bill-brokerages and the principal shareholder in a booming West Country copper mine. Even after his early death, the collapse of the brokerage and a drop in the mine’s profits, the family remained comparatively rich. Morris was not only able to finance his ventures, but also learned from these vicissitudes how to manage the
