Valerie Grove

Keeping Up with the Burne-Joneses

A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy, and Edward Burne Jones

By

Doubleday 336pp £20 order from our bookshop

WHAT WILL BECOME of biography when there are no more caches of handwritten letters for future generations to find, I wonder. This captivating family history, which paints a vivid tableau of Victorian and Edwardian life in the best circles, grew from a cache of letters – adoring, confiding, intimate, written from the heart, sometimes five a day – by the painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones to a married woman named May Gaskell.

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