The Tragic Affair of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Jane Morris
When I was nineteen years old, I was living in a student squat, sleeping on an old mattress on the floor, walking everywhere to save on the bus fare.
I was starved of beauty.
One day, I saw a poster of a painting hanging in a shop window that stopped me in my tracks. A woman with heavy dark hair and a sorrowful face, loosely dressed in blue-green silk, holding a pomegranate in her hand. The fruit had been split open to show the red pulp within. Behind her, a faint glimpse of light.
In the lower left-hand corner of the painting was a scroll inscribed with “Dante Gabriel Rossetti”, a name I had never heard before. In the upper right corner was a square of poetry written in Italian. I recognised the name “Proserpina”, the Greek form of Persephone. She was the goddess of spring, kidnapped by Hades and condemned to spend six months of the year in the underworld after eating just six pomegranate seeds. During her imprisonment, the whole world grew cold and barren. Winter clamped upon the Earth for the first time.
It was my favourite
