Georgiana Burne-Jones

Georgiana Burne-Jones wrote the standard life of her husband and sat on a parish council in a village that disagreed with her about a war. She was one of the MacDonald sisters, daughters of a Methodist minister, whose marriages produced a remarkable set of connections: her sisters' sons were Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, and a third sister married the painter Edward Poynter. She trained as a singer and gave it up, and had begun to learn wood-engraving with a view to working alongside her husband when children and his career ended it. She married Edward Burne-Jones at nineteen and endured his long affair with Maria Zambaco, which was public enough to be an embarrassment and ended with an attempted drowning in Regent's Park. She stayed, and the friendship with William Morris - whose own marriage was similarly arranged around Rossetti - was one of the things that got her through it. She followed Morris into socialism, which her husband did not. The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, published in 1904, is the principal source for the Pre-Raphaelite circle and is careful about what it leaves out. She was elected to the parish council at Rottingdean in 1894, one of the first women in England eligible to stand, and used it mainly to argue about drains and cottages for labourers. In 1900, on the relief of Mafeking, she hung a banner across her house reading that we have killed and also taken possession, and a celebrating crowd came to pull it down. Kipling, her nephew and a neighbour, came out and talked them away. She was seventy-nine when she died, having outlived her husband by twenty-two years and spent them keeping his reputation in order.

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