Kelmscott Manor relationship with its setting, especially its garden. The Manor is featured in Morris' work "News from Nowhere". It also appears in the background of "Water Willow", a portrait of his wife, Jane Morris, painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1871. After William Morris's death in 1896, the Manor continued to be occupied by his widow, Jane Morris (who purchased it in 1913) and later, his daughters. May Morris died in 1938 and bequeathed the house to Oxford University, on the basis the contents were preserved and the public were granted access. The University were unwilling to preserve the house as
Dante Gabriel Rossetti wife, Elizabeth Siddal, died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child. Rossetti became increasingly depressed, and on the death of his beloved Lizzie, buried the bulk of his unpublished poems with her at Highgate Cemetery, though he later had them dug up. He idealised her image as Dante's Beatrice in a number of paintings, such as "Beata Beatrix". After the death of his wife, Rossetti leased a Tudor House at 16, Cheyne Walk, in Chelsea, where he lived for 20 years surrounded by extravagant furnishings and a parade of exotic birds and