Wednesday 22 September 2010

Desperately Romantic Reading

I finished reading Desperate Romantics last night after being glued to it for days.
It’s not so much that it's fantastically written – and the proofreaders should surely take the rap for some absolute howlers – but it's an entertaining romp through the lives of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is an 1850s rock star painter: sexy, stomping around and swooning after every ‘stunner’ who waggles her hips at him as she wanders past.
He is joined by John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, who together form the 'secret' society PRB – publicly unveiled in the 1850s as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – alongside Thomas Woolner, Frederick George Stephens, James Collinson and ‘wait for me!’ tagalong little brother William Michael Rossetti.
As the book progresses and the second wave of Pre-Raphaelites including William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones arrive, sexually incontinent Rossetti gets bored with his first muse, shopgirl Lizzie Siddal, and beds by turns Morris’ wife Jane, Pre-Raphaelite favourite Annie and anyone else with a swanlike neck, bee-sting lips and gingery hair.
Morris seeks solace following his wife’s affair in Mrs Burne-Jones;  then Pre-Raphaelite patron Ruskin’s wife annuls their marriage and runs off with Millais, causing the scandal of the century, and they all descend into a cloud of magenta and cyan-spattered frenzy.
Oh, and they all do a bit of painting too. 
Ophelia, Proserpine, Venus Astarte – the painters cast their muses in provocative, historical settings and spark furious outrage among Victorians with their sexually charged paintings.
Meanwhile, they set the scene for a new type of Bohemian lifestyle completely at odds with society’s veneration of the family.
As well as rattling through the story, Desperate Romantics also goes some way to disprove some of the most oft-repeated legends of the Victorian era.
The myth about John Ruskin’s disgust at his bride Effie’s pubic hair (a story even Bill Bryson recounted in At Home) being the reason he failed to consummate the marriage is dismissed. No one really knows what happened when poor Effie shrugged off her nightie on her wedding night but Ruskin must have studied Life Drawing classes so whatever turned him off, it wasn’t Effie’s womanly state. 
The mistakes in it are undeniably distracting – chloral once becomes ‘choral’, Lizzie Siddall meets a ‘grizzly’ end (was one of Rossetti’s exotic animals on the loose?) and ‘had’ and ‘has’ are confused, to name just a couple of mistakes.
It does not detract too far from the overall story but it is irritating and made me wonder – probably without base – whether a finer toothcomb should have been used on the research as well as the final story.
The attraction for modern readers with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood lies in the circle of friendship. I’m absolutely certain that if I was around in those times I’d have been swotting around with Christina Rossetti polishing the lyrics of In The Bleak Midwinter instead (“‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow?’ Bingo!”) but you can’t help imagine that if you had been sitting in the cheap seats of some hell-hole theatre, a clever artist might have walked past and decided you too had the face of Helen of Troy.
I didn’t actually watch the BBC TV series last year but having finished the book, I’m going to get myself the box set and settle down to tune in.

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