William Morris
1834–1896
Biography
William Morris (1834–1896) was an English designer, poet and socialist, and one of the central figures of Victorian art. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, into a prosperous middle-class family, he studied at Oxford, where his fascination with the medieval past took hold. He went on to design wallpapers, textiles, furniture and stained glass, and to build a firm that brought his work to a wide public. Late in life he founded the Kelmscott Press, which produced finely printed books in a style that looked back to the early days of printing.
His writing covered poetry, prose romance, translation and politics. He translated Icelandic sagas into English and wrote long narrative poems such as The Earthly Paradise. His utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890) imagines a future England without private property or wage labour. In the 1880s he became an active socialist and helped found the Socialist League in 1884. Earlier, in 1877, he had set up the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings to oppose the damaging restoration of old churches and houses.
Two of his books are on this site. The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems, which appeared in 1858 as his first book of verse, draws on Arthurian legend and reflects the medieval interests he shared with the Pre-Raphaelite painters. The House of the Wolfings (1888) is a prose romance set among an early Germanic people, and it is often cited as one of the works that helped lay the ground for modern fantasy fiction. Together they show Morris as a poet, and as a writer who turned to the past for new kinds of storytelling.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems
by William Morris
William Morris's first book of poems, from 1858, gives Queen Guenevere's defence before her accusers, Sir Galahad's Christmas vision, the dramatic scenes of Sir Peter Harpdon's End, Rapunzel, and a run of dark and bright ballads of the Hundred Years' War. It includes The…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.The House of the Wolfings: A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse
by William Morris
A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark is a fantasy novel by William Morris, perhaps the first modern fantasy writer to unite an imaginary world with the element of the supernatural, and thus the precursor of much of present-day fantasy literature.…
Summary from Wikipedia: The House of the Wolfings (CC BY-SA 4.0)