Who Was May Morris?
May Morris (born Mary Morris, 1862-1938) was a British embroiderer, jewellery designer, textile designer, editor, and craftswoman of the Arts and Crafts Movement who took over the embroidery section of her father's firm in 1885, aged 23. She was born at Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, on March 25, 1862, the younger daughter of William Morris (the central figure of the Arts and Crafts Movement) and Jane Morris (born Jane Burden, William Morris's wife and Pre-Raphaelite model). May had one older sister, Jenny (Jane Alice Morris, 1861-1935). May was raised in the Morris household at Kelmscott Manor (which the Morris family had rented since 1871) and at the London houses where the Morris family lived through her childhood. She studied embroidery at the National Art Training School (later the Royal College of Art), eventually took over as head of the embroidery department at Morris's firm in 1885, and continued her own design practice for over fifty years. She edited the twenty-four-volume Collected Works of William Morris (1910-1915) after her father's death.
May Morris, 1909. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
This guide covers who May Morris was, her early life as the daughter of William Morris and Jane Morris, her embroidery and jewellery design, her role as head of the embroidery department at Morris's firm, her founding of the Women's Guild of Arts, her editorship of William Morris's Collected Works, and her cultural legacy.
Who was May Morris?
May Morris was the younger daughter of William Morris and Jane Morris and one of the leading women designers and craftspeople of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. May Morris's life ran from Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, where she was born in 1862 (her father had commissioned the house from Philip Webb), to Kelmscott Manor, where she died in 1938 after living there for most of her later life.
Her working life lasted more than fifty years. Embroidery is what May Morris is remembered for, and fairly so. She designed jewelry and textiles too, and editing took years of her life, as did lecturing and writing. One surprise for a lot of readers: a good share of the embroidery credited to William Morris is really hers. That's especially true from 1885 on, after she became head of the embroidery department at Morris's firm (she was twenty-three).
She mattered to the movement's institutions as well as its workrooms. In 1907 May Morris and Mary Elizabeth Turner Hewitt founded the Women's Guild of Arts for women artists and designers, a professional community the male-dominated Art Workers' Guild didn't offer. And she lectured, widely. Embroidery and design were her usual subjects, with Arts and Crafts theory in the mix, and the talks took her abroad on lecture tours.
Her father died in 1896. Between 1910 and 1915 the twenty-four volumes of the Collected Works of William Morris came out with May Morris as editor, and the introductions and notes she wrote for them are still primary sources on his work. As author editions go, it's one of the most important for any nineteenth-century British writer.
May Morris died at Kelmscott Manor on October 17, 1938, at 76. She left the manor and her collection to Oxford University, with her companion Mary Lobb allowed to live there for life, and Oxford later handed the house on to the Society of Antiquaries of London. They still run it as a museum open to the public. For the work itself, go to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, London, where her life and work are documented.
What was May Morris's early life?
Mary Morris (always called May from childhood) was born on March 25, 1862, at Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, the country house her father William Morris and the architect Philip Webb had designed for the Morris family's first married home. She was the younger of two girls. Her sister, Jane Alice Morris (called Jenny, 1861-1935), had been born about fourteen months before her.
Red House was home from 1860 to 1865. The family then moved to Queen Square in central London, and from 1871 they split their time between London and Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. The London base moved twice more, to Horrington House in Turnham Green in 1872 and to Kelmscott House in Hammersmith in 1878. Whichever house it was, it was busy. Her father's design work was everywhere. Her mother embroidered and sat for Pre-Raphaelite paintings, while people from the Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts circles came and went all the time. Not a bad start for a designer.
The needle came early. William Morris taught both May and Jenny embroidery when they were small, and May had real talent for it. Her mother taught her as well (Jane Morris was a skilled embroiderer herself). A lot of that early training happened around the firm's workshops in London (at Queen Square, later Merton Abbey).
Formal lessons started around 1878 at the National Art Training School in South Kensington, the school that later became the Royal College of Art. May Morris enrolled to study embroidery and pattern design, building on what she'd already picked up at home. It was one of several major British art schools of the period.
As a young woman she was striking, and now and then she modeled for her father's friends (and for some of her own work). In the 1880s, through socialist politics, she met George Bernard Shaw. The two were particularly close, and what followed was complicated, part romance and part meeting of minds, stretched across many years. Shaw's letters to her and about her are an important primary source on the life of May Morris.
Home had its hard side. Jenny had epilepsy from her teenage years onward, and caring for her became a big part of family life. In the 1890s, as her father's health declined, May Morris took on more and more of the household, and more of the family business.
What was May Morris's role at Morris's firm.?
May Morris took over as head of the embroidery department at Morris's firm in 1885, when she was twenty-three years old. She held the job until 1899, setting the design direction and supervising the firm's embroidery work the whole way through. Leaving didn't mean stopping. After 1899 she kept designing embroidery for Morris's firm on a freelance basis, alongside her own independent practice.
Under May Morris the department turned out a big body of designs. Churches ordered altar frontals and vestments from it, and banners as well. A drawing room could be dressed from her workroom right down to the bell pull: the cushions came from there, and the table covers, and so did screens and fire screens. Upstairs it was bed hangings. At the top end sat major commissions, among them embroidered panels for country houses designed by Philip Webb and others.
Plenty of it ended up under the wrong name. Books on Morris's firm credit William Morris with many embroidery designs that May Morris actually drew after 1885. Part of the reason is how the family worked, with everyone's hands in everything, and part is the old habit of crediting a firm's designs to its founder. Between the two, her specific contributions got buried. Modern scholars are slowly giving more of them back to her. (A rough rule if you're looking at a piece from the firm: embroidery dated after 1885 deserves a second look for May's hand.)
May Morris was especially good at composing patterns for the needle. From her father came the love of natural forms, flowers and leaves above all, with vines winding through. What she added was a feel for what only thread can do. Color shades by degrees in stitching, and a worked surface has a texture print just doesn't. That's why her designs look their best embroidered by hand, playing to the craft's own strengths.
Teaching ran through May Morris's whole career. She taught embroidery at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and took a great many private pupils as well. A generation of British and American women embroiderers in the Arts and Crafts tradition learned from her.
High design quality and fine craftsmanship, sold under the Morris name, made Morris embroidery a leading premium category in late Victorian and Edwardian British decorative arts.
Did May Morris marry?
Yes. May Morris married Henry Halliday Sparling on June 14, 1890. He was a socialist editor, and the family knew him as a friend from the same political circles. It wasn't a happy marriage, and it ended in divorce in 1898, only eight years in.
Writers on her life usually describe it as a difficult match that didn't work for either of them. Shaw was part of the trouble. May Morris had been romantically involved with him in the years before she married Sparling, and his continuing involvement with the family complicated things. Her letters and papers make the unhappiness plain. Some are held at the William Morris Gallery, others at the British Library and in Oxford.
May Morris never remarried. In the 1910s she met Mary Lobb (Mary Frances Vivian Lobb), a younger woman who became her main companion and supporter for the last twenty-plus years of her life. Writers have called the relationship a close friendship, or a domestic partnership. Some go further and call it a romance. The record doesn't settle it, but their letters leave no doubt about how close they were.
From the 1920s on, May Morris and Mary Lobb lived at Kelmscott Manor and ran it as a shared household. That meant the house and the farm around it, with May's design and editorial work carrying on at the same time. Lobb nursed her through her last illness, and the will let her live on at the manor for life.
There were no children. Jenny, whose epilepsy stayed with her through adult life, never married and had none either, so William Morris's line through his daughters ended with them. The Morris name carried on through more distant relatives. His immediate family line didn't.
What was May Morris's role in the Women's Guild of Arts?
May Morris founded the Women's Guild of Arts in 1907, along with Mary Elizabeth Turner Hewitt and other women artists and designers. It was for women working in the Arts and Crafts tradition, and it gave them what the male-dominated Art Workers' Guild wouldn't: a professional community of their own.
Some background helps here. Founded in 1884, the Art Workers' Guild was the main professional body for British Arts and Crafts designers and craftspeople. Through its early period it didn't admit women members at all, so women designers had nothing parallel to join. That's the gap May Morris and the other women of the Arts and Crafts circle set out to fill.
From 1907 on, the Women's Guild of Arts (sometimes just called the Women's Guild) ran as a professional organization for women in the visual arts. Embroiderers joined, and illustrators. So did women in jewelry design and the decorative arts, and in related fields. The Guild held exhibitions and organized lectures. Mostly, though, it gave its members each other.
Women in embroidery and jewelry got the most from it, along with the decorative arts more generally, since there was so little professional infrastructure for them otherwise. An embroiderer could at least look to the Royal School of Art Needlework (founded 1872) for some support. Anyone in the wider decorative arts had less institutional backing than that.
She argued for women artists and designers in her lectures and her writing, and through her own professional example. In 1909-1910 she traveled to the United States for a long lecture tour on Arts and Crafts embroidery. She spoke at major institutions there and helped shape the American Arts and Crafts Movement while she was at it.
That's why she belongs in the wider history of women in art and design, not only in books about her father. Founding the Guild and building a career as a designer and craftswoman make May Morris an important figure in the early twentieth-century movement for women's professional recognition in the arts. We think it's the side of her that deserves more attention.
What did May Morris design?
May Morris designed embroidery (her primary craft), jewellery, textiles, wallpaper, embroidered books and bookbindings, and decorative arts across many media. That work spans more than fifty years, from her teenage training in her father's workshop to her later years at Kelmscott Manor.
Embroidery is the biggest part. Hundreds of May Morris designs survive, some in the firm's archives and others at the William Morris Gallery. The Victoria and Albert Museum has a share, and so do other major collections. The range runs from vestments and altar frontals for churches to cushions and bed hangings for the home, and at the grand end are embroidered panels for country house commissions.
Jewelry was its own line of work. She made brooches and pendants in the Arts and Crafts tradition, necklaces too, and other pieces. The materials were the movement's own (silver and enamel, semi-precious stones and the like), and the motifs were hers, flowers and other natural forms. If you've seen her pieces at the William Morris Gallery, you'll know the look.
Textiles were another line, printed and woven patterns for Morris's firm. They've had the same attribution trouble as the embroidery. Some patterns credited to her father in the literature were really designed by May, or co-designed with her, mostly from the period when she was actively involved in the family firm.
Wallpaper is a smaller share. May Morris designed several for Morris's firm, fewer than her embroideries or textiles, and they keep to the family tradition of patterns taken from nature. (As a wallpaper shop, we'll admit we wish there were more of them.)
Books pulled her in too. Her father founded the Kelmscott Press, his private press, in 1891, and she was involved in producing its rare books and limited editions. She also designed embroidered book covers, which is about as Morris-family a mix of design and craft as you'll find.
Outside design, editing was her most important work, above all the twenty-four-volume Collected Works of William Morris (1910-1915), whose introductions and editorial notes remain primary sources on her father's work. She published essays and lectures of her own as well, on embroidery and design history and on Arts and Crafts theory.
How did May Morris edit William Morris's Collected Works?
After William Morris's death on October 3, 1896, May Morris began the major project of editing the Collected Works of William Morris, a comprehensive twenty-four-volume edition of her father's writings published 1910-1915 by Longmans, Green & Co. It's still the standard scholarly edition of William Morris's writing.
The job was enormous. First May Morris had to gather everything, manuscripts and letters as well as the versions already in print. Then it all had to be shaped into a coherent edition. Every volume got a long introduction from her, plus editorial notes, and she managed production with the publisher on top of that. Publication alone ran from 1910 to 1915, all twenty-four volumes.
For a lot of readers, those introductions are the reason to open the set at all. Few sources on William Morris's life and thinking matter as much. May Morris was writing about her own father, with the family papers and letters to hand, and she'd had long conversations with his friends and collaborators. Don't expect strict biography, though. They're personal essays that put each work in context and shed light on it, and we like them better for it.
Inside are the poetry and the prose romances. The lectures are there too, next to his political and design writing. The way it's arranged lets you trace how Morris developed across genres and across decades. Critics reviewed it widely when it came out, and it became the standard reference for scholars and admirers of his work.
Later editions and biographies have added to it, but none has fully superseded it as the complete edition of Morris's writing. Major libraries around the world still keep the twenty-four-volume set, and Morris scholars still consult it now, in the early twenty-first century.
Where did May Morris live?
May Morris lived in several Morris family residences across her life. The first was Red House in Bexleyheath (1862-1865). Queen Square in central London came next (1865-1872), then Horrington House in Turnham Green (1872-1878) and Kelmscott House in Hammersmith (1878-1896). From 1871 the family also rented Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire as a country place, and May Morris spent long stretches there as a child and a young woman.
By 1890 May Morris had moved out to 8 Hammersmith Terrace, and Kelmscott House stopped being the family's Hammersmith home when her father died in 1896. After her mother Jane died in 1914, May took over Kelmscott Manor as her main home. It stayed her home for the rest of her life.
The manor itself dates from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and stands in the village of Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, on the Upper Thames. William Morris first rented it in 1871, sharing the tenancy with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The family kept leasing it from then on, and in 1913 Jane Morris bought it. After Jane Morris died, it passed to May Morris.
Mary Lobb lived there with her from the 1920s on. The two women ran the Manor and the farm around it as a shared household while May carried on her design and editorial work, and May Morris died at Kelmscott Manor on October 17, 1938.
May Morris's will left the Manor to Oxford University, with Lobb allowed to live there for life. Lobb outlived May by less than a year, dying in September 1939. Oxford later transferred it to the Society of Antiquaries of London, and they still run it as a museum open to the public (we'd say make the trip).
Walthamstow, in London, is the other place to find her. The William Morris Gallery there, in her father's childhood home, Water House, keeps and displays her life and work alongside his. It holds significant collections of May Morris's embroidery and jewelry, along with other designs.
What is May Morris known for?
May Morris is known for her embroidery design (the largest body of her artistic work), her jewellery design, her role as head of the embroidery department at Morris's firm from 1885 to 1899, her founding of the Women's Guild of Arts in 1907, her editorship of William Morris's twenty-four-volume Collected Works (1910-1915), her lectures and writing on embroidery and Arts and Crafts design, and her continuation of the Morris family Arts and Crafts tradition into the twentieth century.
Embroidery comes first, since that's where her reputation is strongest. In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods May Morris was one of the leading British embroiderers. She paired her father's natural forms with her own sense of what embroidery can do. For decades her designs set the course of the firm's embroidery, and her teaching reached a generation of British and American embroiderers.
May Morris's jewelry deserves more notice than it gets, in our view. It belongs to the Arts and Crafts jewelry movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, using the movement's materials and craftsmanship to carry her own floral and natural-form motifs.
The Guild is next. Founding the Women's Guild of Arts in 1907 was a major contribution to women's professional recognition in the visual arts, because it gave women shut out of the male-dominated Art Workers' Guild a professional community.
As an editor she's known for one very large project. The twenty-four-volume Collected Works of William Morris (1910-1915) is still the standard scholarly edition of her father's writing, and Morris scholars keep citing her introductions and notes as primary sources.
Taken as a whole, May Morris's career makes her a leading woman designer and craftsperson of the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Scholarly biographies and major museum exhibitions have recorded that legacy, and so have the collections holding material from Morris's firm.
The William Morris Gallery gave her a major exhibition in 2017-2018, "May Morris: Art and Life," which brought new attention to her work and helped separate her artistic identity from her father's. The art historian and curator Jenny Lister is one of the scholars who've documented the life of May Morris, and that work keeps returning designs credited to her father to the woman who actually drew them. May Morris designs are more and more recognized as a body of work in their own right, apart from what she gave the family business and the Morris name. For the bigger picture, our Arts and Crafts Movement guide covers the broader movement that May Morris helped lead.
May Morris questions
Who was May Morris?
May Morris (born Mary Morris, 1862-1938) was a British embroiderer, jewellery designer, textile designer, editor, and craftswoman, and a leading figure in the Arts and Crafts Movement. William and Jane Morris's younger daughter, she was born at Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, on March 25, 1862. By 23 she was head of the embroidery department at Morris's firm (that was 1885). The Women's Guild of Arts came in 1907, and after her father's death she edited his twenty-four-volume Collected Works (1910-1915).
Did May Morris marry?
Yes. May Morris married Henry Halliday Sparling, a socialist editor, on June 14, 1890, and they divorced in 1898 after eight unhappy years. She never remarried and had no children. Most of her later life was spent at Kelmscott Manor with her companion Mary Lobb.
Where did May Morris live?
May Morris lived at Red House in Bexleyheath (1862-1865, her birthplace), Queen Square in central London (1865-1872), Kelmscott House in Hammersmith (1878-1896), 8 Hammersmith Terrace (from 1890), and Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire (which the family had rented since 1871 and which became her primary residence from 1914 until her death in 1938). That's where May Morris died, on October 17, 1938, and the house is open to visitors now.
What are the most famous Morris prints?
The most famous Morris prints (designed by William Morris and the broader Morris firm team, often including May Morris and John Henry Dearle) include "Strawberry Thief" (1883), "Trellis" (1864, Morris's first wallpaper), "Honeysuckle" (1876, a chintz; May Morris's separate "Honeysuckle" wallpaper dates from 1883), "Pimpernel" (1876), "Acanthus" (1875), "Willow Boughs" (1887), "Chrysanthemum" (1877), and "Daisy" (1864). Not all of them are his alone, though. Plenty of designs credited to William Morris were really by May Morris after 1885 (embroidery especially), or by John Henry Dearle later on.
Who is the father of art and craft?
William Morris is most commonly called the father of the Arts and Crafts Movement, as the central figure who combined design work, writing, business leadership, and political theory across many aspects of the movement. Ask someone who reads the theory and you may hear John Ruskin instead, the writer whose work inspired Morris and who is sometimes called the spiritual father of the movement. Architecture has its own candidate, since Philip Webb is sometimes called the father of Arts and Crafts architecture.
What did May Morris design?
May Morris designed embroidery (her largest body of work, including ecclesiastical and domestic embroidery for Morris's firm), jewellery (Arts and Crafts brooches, pendants, necklaces in silver, enamel, semi-precious stones), textiles, wallpaper (a smaller body of designs), embroidered bookbindings, and decorative arts across many media. If you only look at one part, make it the embroidery, which shaped what Morris's firm produced for decades and looks best worked by hand.
What was the Women's Guild of Arts?
The Women's Guild of Arts was a professional organization for women artists and designers founded by May Morris and Mary Elizabeth Turner Hewitt in 1907. Why was it needed? The male-dominated Art Workers' Guild didn't admit women in its early period, so there was no equivalent professional community for them. Members worked in embroidery and illustration, jewelry and the decorative arts, and the Guild backed them with exhibitions and lectures.
How did May Morris edit William Morris's Collected Works?
May Morris edited the twenty-four-volume Collected Works of William Morris (1910-1915), gathering her father's writings (poetry, prose romances, lectures, political writings, design writings) into a comprehensive edition. Each volume opens with a long introduction from her, drawn from what she knew of her father firsthand. Our verdict: still the standard scholarly edition, and still widely cited.
