The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination

While still a student at Oxford, Edward Burne-Jones formed a friendship and made a renunciation that would shape art history. The friendship was with William Morris, with whom he would occupy the social and intellectual center of the era’s cult of beauty. The renunciation was of his intention to enter the clergy, when he—together with Morris—vowed to throw over the Church in favor of art. In Fiona MacCarthy’s riveting account of Burne-Jones’s life, that exchange of faith for art places him ...