May Morris described herself, in a letter to George Bernard Shaw, as ‘a remarkable woman’. Managing a successful business at a time when there were few women active in commerce, she was a noted and respected social activist and political campaigner, a talented artist in her own right, the torchbearer and champion of her father’s work, and the curator of his legacy at Kelmscott until her death in 1938. Despite her artistic and commercial achievements, May declared hers to be ‘a wasted life’, and it is this assertion that the publication, May Morris: art and life, seeks to challenge.

The essays in this volume are the outcome of a conference convened in the spring of 2016 by the William Morris Gallery. The conference paved the way for the exhibition held at the gallery from October 2017 to January 2018, at which over eighty items were assembled from private and public collections. Fourteen contributors to the book provide chapters, each of which focuses on a different activity or element of May’s life; her lecture tour of America, her teaching and her relationship with her epileptic sister Jenny, to whom she was seemingly devoted, are among the topics covered. It is, however, the various aspects of May’s deep involvement with decorative needlework that form the core of the book. An essay by the volume’s editor, Lynn Hulse, in exploring May’s role in the revival of interest in medieval embroidery, demonstrates the depth of her knowledge of authorities on the subject both ancient and modern. Annette Carruthers supplies a chapter on May Morris at Melsetter in Orkney, ‘the pleasantest house for staying in I’ve ever been at’, where she eased the affliction of her father’s death and recent divorce by making experiments with dyeing. May’s curation of Kelmscott is discussed in the concluding chapters by Kathy Haslam and Julia Dudkiewicz.

In keeping with a book that celebrates its subject’s life alongside her art, we are given glimpses of May’s character. Catherine White, in a chapter on May Morris and her embroiderers, unearths two very different accounts of May’s management style by members of her staff. Although the experience of Lily Yeats, sister of the poet, evokes working conditions akin to a zero-hours contract at Sports Direct, another story reveals a beneficent and forward-looking employer. In a clash of personalities, May could be unyielding, but she had a head for business and a capacity for innovation; she introduced inexpensive embroidery kits for women to stitch at home, assimilating her socialist ambition to democratise beauty with commercial savoir-faire. The matter of May’s socialism is covered in a chapter by Anna Mason; as an agitator she was earnest but no firebrand, and, despite her conspicuous good looks in youth, had no wish to become a poster-girl for the movement.

There are some interesting anecdotes included, such as her encounter with a customs inspector on her arrival in New York to ‘spread the gospel of utilitarianism in art’: to her surprise, he is an admirer of her father and quotes one of his poems. May’s negotiations with the Victoria and Albert Museum over the publicity photographs for the Morris Centenary Exhibition in 1934 suggest at best a single-minded and controlling nature and at worst an Electra complex.

As an account of May Morris’s activities and interests this book scores highly. It is beautifully illustrated with very well-reproduced plates and will be a valuable resource for researchers and Morris devotees keen to piece together the disparate roles that May adopted. The major relationships in her fascinating, eclectic life are outlined in black and white, but none is coloured by any depth of analysis. It is intriguing to learn that, on May’s marriage to Henry Sparling, her socialist colleagues gave her a set of Walter Scott’s novels with a bookplate designed by Walter Crane. Did May, who declared forthrightly during her lecture tour of the United States that ‘the costume of today is neither picturesque nor clever’, warm to those opulent descriptions of medieval dress and tapestry that grace the pages of such a book as Ivanhoe?