The story goes that the name of William Morris was ‘intimately associated with the arts of domestic decoration’, as a journalist for Cassell's Saturday Journal noted in 1890 (Pinkney 2005: 44), and Morris's own homes – Red House, Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott House – exemplified his philosophy of ‘The Beauty of Life’ (1880). But where is Jane Morris in this picture and what was her role in Morrisian domesticity? Was she simply part of the furniture, a decorative element in Morris's ‘artistic mise-en-scène’ at home, as MacCarthy claimed (1994: 137)? From contemporary observations in the nineteenth century to the scholarly and biographical traditions surrounding Morris and Rossetti in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Jane Morris's role in the home is only fleetingly glimpsed. The connotation of immobility attached to the artist's model, not to mention the strong association between Jane Morris and the ‘lady on the sofa’ myth, has meant that her domestic labour and creative collaborations at home have too often been overlooked. In a provocative account of the Red House years (1861–5), for instance, Amy Bingaman described the women of the Morris circle, including Jane, as ‘dolls in the elaborate play at Red House – props asked to play a part without reaping any remuneration or self-satisfaction’ (2000: 99) while more recently Deborah Lutz's account of the collaborations and creation of objects ‘solidly expressive of relationships’ at Red House is entirely confined to the labour of men there (2011: 163).