May Morris

May Morris ran the embroidery department of Morris and Company at twenty-three, edited her father's collected works in twenty-four volumes, and founded the Women's Guild of Arts because the Art Workers' Guild would not admit women. She was the younger daughter of William and Jane Morris, grew up at Kelmscott among the people who made the Arts and Crafts movement, and trained at the National Art Training School. Her embroidery is not a lesser branch of the family business: she designed wallpapers, jewellery and hangings, took the department over in 1885, taught at the Central School and lectured in America, and her surviving panels are now shown as work in their own right rather than as her father's. She married Henry Halliday Sparling and left him for a period with George Bernard Shaw, who described the episode much later and unkindly; she referred to it once as a mystic betrothal and said no more. After her father died in 1896 she spent decades on the edition of his writings, which is the standard one still, and on protecting Kelmscott Manor, which she left in trust so that it would be preserved and opened. She founded the Women's Guild of Arts in 1907 with Mary Elizabeth Turner. Her reputation was submerged in her father's for most of the twentieth century and has been substantially recovered since the 1980s, with a major exhibition of her own designs in 2017. She catalogued and rehung the Morris collections and lectured on embroidery into her seventies. Her hangings are held by the Victoria and Albert Museum and the William Morris Gallery. She never had children and left Kelmscott to Oxford University, which passed it to the Society of Antiquaries.

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