ABSTRACT
William Morris, it is generally agreed, has been the subject of three great biographies: those by J. W. Mackail, E. P. Thompson, and Fiona MacCarthy. The history of Morris biography is, however, more complicated. The works of Mackail, Thompson, and MacCarthy are indeed great books—Morris has been fortunate in his biographers—but each is a product of its cultural moment, and each has distinctive strengths and limitations. Moreover, the great-men-and-one-woman model of Morris biography ignores other crucial contributors: a daughter, a female friend, two business historians, and a variety of other writers and scholars. Mackail began his biography of William Morris only a dozen years after the controversy over Froude’s Carlyle. He was well aware that Morris’s marriage to Jane Burden was, if not as explosively disastrous as that of the Carlyles, less than blissful.
