William Morris: A Life for Our Time

An accomplished and original designer of textiles and furniture, books and typefaces, a socialist activist, poet and novelist (News from Nowhere), Morris (1834- 1896) had a ``magpie mind'' that sought expression in any number of media. MacCarthy (Eric Gill, a prize-winning biography of the sculptor), illuminates the paradoxes that shaped Morris's ``painfully heroic progress through life.'' Morris was a manufacturer of lush housewares who rejected his father as a ``capitalist villain''; an astringent critic of Victorian England who nearly became its poet laureate; a man both worldly and naive, stymied by his wife's affair with the charismatic Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Morris emerges in vivid snapshots as vital, protean and compassionate. This is the biography of a temperament--of a burgeoning reaction against late Victorian bourgeois complacency--that Morris shared with his friend painter Edward Burne-Jones, Rossetti, George Bernard Shaw and others. It also is shaped by interesting extended discussions--of the period's architecture, politics and literature--that sometimes distract from the account of the life they purportedly illuminate. Erudite, lavishly illustrated, including 24 pages of color, and absorbing, this is of interest for the amateur as well as the professional student of Victorian England. (Sept.)