ABSTRACT
Gaskell's familiarity with the three founders of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, is attested in several of her letters. In a letter to Rossetti in 1859, for instance, she profusely apologizes for her error in her address (Back End instead of Bank End) and piquantly justifies the long explanation of her error “as a proof of my very pre-raphaelite love of accuracy,” an awareness which is evidenced in her novels, as I will demonstrate. In the same letter she thanks him for the copy of his translation of Vita Nuova and suggests that he change a couple of words “which cause the line to strike my ear as unrhythmical” (Further Letters 199–200). Later in the same year, in a letter to Charles Norton, she describes her encounters with Rossetti in her characteristically humorous tone:
I think we got to know Rossetti pretty well. I went three times to his studio, and met him at two evening parties—where I had a good deal of talk with him, always excepting the times when ladies with beautiful hair came in when he was like the cat turned into a lady, who jumped out of bed and ran after a mouse. It did not signify what we were talking about or how agreeable I was; if a particular kind of reddish brown, crêpe wavy hair came in, he was away in a moment struggling for an introduction to the owner of said head of hair. He is not as mad as a March hare, but hair-mad. (Letters 444)
