William Morris Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Florence S. Boos

Critical Essay by Florence S. Boos

SOURCE: “An (Almost) Egalitarian Sage: William Morris and Nineteenth-Century Socialist-Feminism,” in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thaïs E. Morgan, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 187-206.

In the following essay, Boos investigates the socialist-feminist element in William Morris's writing.

In the last decade of his life, William Morris developed a sage voice of “fellowship” in works whose most memorable protagonists are outsiders: a working-class revolutionary; a soon-to-be-martyred visionary priest; two “guests” who are displaced from their physical and temporal origins; and two young women who seek to realize new forms of wisdom, independence, and social justice. Throughout his life, Morris had included in his works striking portrayals of women, and a high valuation of characteristics he considered “womanly” remained central to the conceptions of beauty and justice in his late poetry and prose romances. For his period, he was remarkably unpuritanical; his poetic embodiments of...
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