Simon Poe follows an engrossing exploration into the story of Burne-Jones's last great love

Apollo, May, 2004 by Simon Poe

A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, her Daughter Amy, and Edward Burne-Jones Josceline Dimbleby Doubleday, 20 [pounds sterling] ISBN 0-385-603233-1

This delightful book will inspire mixed feelings in many readers. Beside enjoyment and admiration, no small number will also experience envy. Anyone who has ever struggled to reconstruct their family history will envy the wealth of material to which Josceline Dimbleby had access while writing this biography of her great grandmother May Gaskell, Edward Burne-Jones's last great love, and her great aunt, Amy Gaskell, the subject of one of his most haunting portraits. Professional writers and researchers (an envious breed at the best of times) will grumble that Mrs Dimbleby, a distinguished cookery and travel writer, should encroach on their territory, but all will concede, even if through gritted teeth, that she has done a good job.

Throughout the book the author slips in and out of the first person, incorporating an account into the main narrative of the progress of her research, and of her personal feelings as her sometimes tragic family history is revealed. The relationship between biographer and subject is always a very intense one (and how much more intense when there is a blood connection?) but Mrs Dimbleby actually admits to a feeling, after yet another almost spooky coincidence, that May Gaskell herself is somehow orchestrating her quest from beyond the grave. A Profound Secret has the narrative drive of a good novel--A.S. Byatt's Possession inevitably springs to mind--and as family memoir it bears comparison with Penelope Fitzgerald's The Knox Brothers. Fans of that late lamented writer will understand that I can hardly offer higher praise.

At the heart of the book are the chapters about May's relationship with Edward Burne-Jones during his last six years. Aficionados of his life and work will want to read A Profound Secret with Georgiana Burne-Jones's Memorials, Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of the painter, and Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere's The Souls beside them on the desk. Those of us fortunate enough to have seen Burne-Jones's portrait of Amy in the recent exhibition of paintings from the Andrew Lloyd Webber collection will be fascinated to find out more about its sitter and the circumstances of its production.

The suspicion grows on us as we read (and it is clever of Mrs Dimbleby to break it to us so gently and gradually) that May and Amy were not really very nice people. The Gaskell men, through several generations, seem to have been taciturn and frequently depressed, and at first we are led to regard this as a misfortune for the women. Before the end of the book we have begun to suspect that glum silence was an entirely appropriate reaction to living with those same women. May, despite frequent protestations of love for her children, regularly deserted them to go on long luxurious trips abroad 'for her health'. Her daughter Daphne admitted that her mother often annoyed her so much that she felt positively unwell. Amy was cold-hearted, probably an opium addict and possibly a suicide. Sir Hugh Clifford, who may well have had the misfortune to be in love with her, left a recognisable portrait in his novel Downfall of the Gods, where she is the incarnation of the Spirit of Destruction. She is 'insatiable, she craves eternally for the bodies and souls of men. She grinds us to dust ... she devours us'.

May' outlived her daughter by thirty years, soldiering on until 1940, and was vouchsafed the opportunity, in old age, to transcend her self-centredness in charitable work. During the 1914-18 war she organised the collection and redistribution to the troops of millions of books and magazines and was awarded a well-deserved CBE. After Burne-Jones's death in 1898, her best friend and favourite correspondent was the arch-imperialist Lord Milner (and the juxtaposition of Milner and Burne-Jones is perhaps only less startling and suggestive than the knowledge that Walter Pater was Douglas Haig's tutor at Oxford).

Anyone who did miss the Pre-Raphaelite and Other Masters exhibition has a second chance to see the portrait of Amy (and who knows how long it will be before Lord Lloyd Weber agrees to lend it again?) in a lovely little show at Leighton House. Beside the oil painting, there is a selection of Burne-Jones's letters to May and her children (many adorned with his drawings) and of the pictures he gave her. Some of these pictures, which May bequeathed to the Ashmolean, are here briefly reunited with their fellows still in private hands. One of the Ashmolean's pictures, a study in silverpoint for The Golden stairs, is displayed beside a letter revealing that it was drawn not with an elegant little pencil, but with a sixpence the artist cut up for the purpose. The most piquant exhibit, since Burne-Jones generally represented himself as grotesquely thin, is perhaps a wistful letter illustrated with a drawing of himself and May at tea together, stout and elderly in an imaginary future. 'I could have been so happy with you--what full it would have been'.