Jane Morris Jane Morris Jane Morris (née Jane Burden; 19 October 1839 – 26 January 1914) was an embroiderer and English artists' model who embodied the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty. She was a model and muse to William Morris (1834–1896), the English textile designer, poet, novelist, translator, and socialist activist, whom she later married, and to Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Jane Burden was born in Oxford, the daughter of a stableman, Robert Burden, and his wife Ann Maizey, who was a laundress. At the time of her birth, her parents were living at St Helen's Passage, in the parish of St Peter-in-the-East, off
Dante Gabriel Rossetti in particular Charles Augustus Howell, to exhume his poems from his wife's grave which he did, collating and publishing them in 1870 in the volume "Poems by D. G. Rossetti". They created controversy when they were attacked as the epitome of the "fleshly school of poetry". Their eroticism and sensuality caused offence. One poem, "Nuptial Sleep", described a couple falling asleep after sex. It was part of Rossetti's sonnet sequence "The House of Life", a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. Rossetti described the sonnet form as a "moment's monument", implying that