Book Review - Gay Daly's Pre-Raphaelites in Love
Pre-Raphaelites in Love by Gay Daly
Published by: Quality Paperback Book Club
Publication Date: 1989
Format: Paperback, 468 Pages
Out of Print
"Who hasn’t been in love with the Preraphaelites? Back in Upper School, my two best friends and I were a wee bit obsessed with the Preraphs—we decorated our notebooks with La Belle Dame San Merci and William Morris prints and recited Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market to one another. (There’s a lot of clucking and clacking and mopping and mowing.) Let’s not even talk about the summer the Burne-Jones exhibit came to New York. We practically lived at the Met, and I still have the commemorative trivet.
What I loved about Gay Daly’s Preraphalites in Love is the way she situates the Preraphs in their context, looking beneath dashing legend to the individual men and their ups and downs. The period I visit in my book is the very early days of the Preraphaelite Brotherhood, back when they’re still signing their pictures PRB, before Burne-Jones, before William Morris, back when the nucleus was still John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Preraphaelites in Love captures, simultaneously, the newness of what these men were doing, and how deeply rooted they are in their culture.
Oh, yes, and those love affairs...." - Lauren Willig
Well, I knew life would catch up with me this month at sometime and one of the books would probably be unread. With an average of 556 pages for each book and most of them being Victorian, my reading speed isn't that fast... so sadly, Pre-Raphaelites in Love will be unread for awhile by me. Yet I couldn't forsake giving you Lauren's insights! So here's Lauren until I can finally finish the book and get my review up. So view this as a hopefully temporary placeholder!
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