Jan Marsh

The world of Bloomsbury is one of pictures and people; it is an artistic and literary style, and also a group of original and creative individuals whose lives have long fascinated the public imagination. Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Vita Sackville-West, Lydia Lopokova, Katherine Mansfield, Frances Partridge, Angelica Garnett: many exceptional women were associated with Bloomsbury. Their writings, letters, diaries, and memoirs provide vivid accounts of friendship, love, art, jealousy, suicide, gossip, and day-to-day affairs over forty years. The men, too, were exceptional artists and writers whose works and words intimately depict Bloomsbury women. . This book traces the Bloomsbury group from its beginnings in the early years of the twentieth century to the old age of its founders and the legacy that lives on, and Jan Marsh brings a new approach to the group and its female protagonists. Illustrated throughout with color and black-and-white archive material, Bloomsbury Women presents portrait studies, decorative images, line drawings, and photographs that compliment the textual narratives of the lives, loves, art, and ideas of an extraordinary group of friends.

"...Pre-Raphaelite Women explores the lives, art and influence of the women associated with the Pre-Raphaelite circle. As models, wives, and lovers of these artists, women such as Elizabeth Siddal, Jane Morris, Fanny Cornforth, Annie Miller, and Maria Zambaco were at the very core of the movement. This unique volume juxtaposes the stories of these women with the paintings they inspired, revealing the discrepancies between the art and the Pre-Raphaelites and their reality. Art authority Jan Marsh explains in her text just how different the painters' idealized visions of these women were from their everyday lives. While portrayed as saints, angels, femme fatales, and courtly ladies, many of the Pre-Raphaelite women came from ordinary, even squalid, backgrounds."--from book jacket.

"The black presence in Victorian art is greater than may be supposed. Indeed, the expanding art market in the nineteenth century was largely based on British prosperity resulting from imperial commerce and conquest. It can therefore be said that Victorian art owes its existence to those who are relatively absent from its images. Black Victorians brings together over 100 images depicting black figures, to reveal the diversity of representation within nineteenth-century visual culture and to foreground the 'forgotten' presence of people of African descent in Victorian British art. The range of images is broad, from pictures of soldiers and sailors in Britain's armed forces and men and women in genre scenes to portraits of entertainers and political refugees and studies of artists' models. Notable individuals featured include actor Ira Aldridge, Crimean heroine Mary Seacole, the Queen's god-daughter Sarah Bonetta Davies, composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. In addition to the fine arts of painting, drawing and sculpture, the selection includes photography, popular illustration, caricature and ephemera, which provide a cultural context for the portraits and subject pictures, as well as presenting black figures as members of British society in everyday settings. Many major artists of the period are represented, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Edward Burne-Jones, Julia Margaret Cameron, Edgar Degas and J. A. M. Whistler. Many works are virtually unknown and collected here for the first time. Presenting an important opportunity to see and assess how black figures have been portrayed in British art, Black Victorians is an original and fascinating survey of a subject that has been given little coverage to date. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to seek a fresh perspective on a well-documented period of British history."--Book jacket.

Eleanor Farjeon first met Edward Thomas in the late autumn of 1912, when her brother invited him to tea. It was the beginning of a deep friendship between the painfully shy 31-year-old woman and the reserved writer known for his prose works and literary criticism. Though he died at the Battle of Arras in April 1917, it was a friendship which for Eleanor did not end with his death, but lived beyond it in his letters, and his poems, many of which Edward had sent to her from the trenches of the First World War for her comments. This double memoir uses Edward's letters and Eleanor's diaries and linking commentary to provide an extraordinarily candid account of their developing friendship, and of the enthusiasms they shared - both loved walking, and it was during this period that Edward first found his way into poetry. Edward was often deeply depressed, a man who found in nature something fundamental and ideal, a soldier-poet who wrote about the war in a new way, but Eleanor also shows us another side to his character, capturing moments of joy and humour. She also offers a unique account of Thomas's development as a poet, including the momentous meeting in 1913 with the American poet Robert Frost, whose encouragement led to Thomas's first poems. Thomas describes for her his family, his friendships with other writers, D. H. Lawrence among them, and also provides an exceptionally detailed account of his experiences in the First World War with the Artists' Rifles.