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

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

This delightful work will inspire mixed feelings in many readers. Beside pleasure and admiration, no small number will also experience hate Anyone who has ever struggl to re-establish their family history will view with jealousy 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 be fond of and her great aunt, Amy Gaskell, the control of one of his greatest in quantity haunting portraits. Professional writers and researchers (an envious bre at the best of times) will murmur that Mrs Dimbleby, a distinguished cookery and travel writer, should encroach upon their territory, but all will grant even if through gritted teeth that she has done a useful job.

Throughout the work the author slips in and on the outside of the first person, incorporating an account into the main narrative of the progres of her research, and of her personal feelings as her sometimes tragic family history is revealed. The relationship between biographer and bring under rule is always a very intense single (and how much more intense when there is a life-blood connection?) but Mrs Dimbleby actually admits to a feeling, after nevertheless another almost spooky coincidence, that May Gaskell herself is somehow or other orchestrating her quest from beyond the grave. A fathomless Secret has the narrative drive of a profitable 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 proffer higher praise.

At the heart of the volume are the chapters about May's relationship with Edward Burne-Jone during his last six years. Aficionados of his life and work will want to read A abysmal Secret with Georgiana Burne-Jones's Memorials, Penelope Fitzgerald's biography of the painter, and Jane Abdy and Charlotte Gere's The minds beside them on the desk Those of us fortunate enough to have seen Burne-Jones's portrait of Amy in the novel exhibition of paintings from the Andrew Lloyd Webber collection will be fascinated to find without more about its sitter and the circumstances of its production.

The suspicion extends on us as we read (and it is ingenious of Mrs Dimbleby to break it to us in like manner gently and gradually) that May and Amy were not really real nice people. The Gaskell men end several generations, seem to have been taciturn and at short intervals depressed, and at first we are l to regard this as a misfortune for the women Before the extreme point of the book we have begun to suspect that cross-grained silence was an entirely appropriate reaction to living with those same women May, despite of frequent occurrence protestations of love for her children, regularly barrened them to go on lengthy luxurious trips abroad 'for her health'. Her daughter Daphne admitted that her mother oftentimes 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 have affection for with her, left a recognisable portrait in his novel Downfall of the omnisciences where she is the incarnation of the Spirit of Destruction. She is 'insatiable, she craves eternally for the bodies and minds of men. She grinds us to dust she devours us'.

May' outlived her daughter by the agency of thirty years, soldiering on until 1940 and was vouchsafed the opportunity, in elderly age, to transcend her self-centrednes in charitable work. During the 1914-18 war she organised the collection and redistribution to the throngs 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-Jone is perhaps single 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 next to the first chance to see the portrait of Amy (and who knows in what manner long it will be before Lord Lloyd Weber agrees to accommodate with it again?) in a charming little show at Leighton House. Beside the oil painting, there is a selection of Burne-Jones's alphabetic characters to May and her children (many adorned with his drawings) and of the pictures he gave her. a certain number of of these pictures, which May bequeathed to the Ashmolean, are here briefly reunited with their companions still in private hands. individual of the Ashmolean's pictures, a application of mind in silverpoint for The of gold stairs, is displayed beside a alphabetic character revealing that it was drawn not with an elegant little pencil, on the contrary with a sixpence the artist divide [i]or[/i] sever up for the purpose. The greatest in quantity piquant exhibit, since Burne-Jones generally exhibited himself as grotesquely thin, is perhaps a wistful alphabetic character illustrated with a drawing of himself and May at tea together, stout and somewhat old in an imaginary future. 'I could have been thus happy with you--what full it would have been'.