Valerie Grove
Keeping Up with the Burne-Joneses
A Profound Secret: May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy, and Edward Burne Jones
By Josceline Dimbleby
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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