The story goes that Jane Morris was ‘ashamed’ of her class background and ‘miserable’ about her husband's socialism. For William Morris's twentieth-century Marxist biographers, this story underpinned their depiction of Jane Morris as a kind of class traitor, condemned for her apparent pretensions to middle-class respectability and repudiation of her working-class origins. In William Morris: His Life and Work, for instance, Jack Lindsay wrote of Jane: ‘She had all the aloofness and snobbism of someone who had come up from the lowest working-class levels to a high genteel status’ (1975: 288), as if ‘aloofness and snobbism’ are only tell-tale qualities of those who are not naturally entitled to ‘high genteel status’. In a similar vein, E. P. Thompson in William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary depicted Jane Morris's rise to bourgeois femininity as an inauthentic performance: she adopted the ‘airs of a Guinevere’ (1976: 158) and, ‘in her spoiled and indifferent way, was hostile to Morris's Socialist views, activities and friends’ (1976: 167). Far from providing a plausible account of Morris's wife, both Lindsay and Thompson naturalise class identity as fixed and irrevocable traits in their two-dimensional portrayal.