The story goes that Jane Morris was ‘an almost legendary figure’ to behold (Rothenstein 1931: 288), ‘hard to believe in as the sight of an actual nineteenth-century Englishwoman’ (Forman 1914: 203). She was often portrayed as an isolated spectacle, distinguished by a physiognomy and style of dress that accentuated her auratic status, with the power to evoke a range of emotional responses in observers. This relentless aestheticisation of Jane Morris has served many purposes, not least to function as a kind of life writing through which the woman and the icon merged to create a seamless life narrative. Testament in part to the success of Rossetti's ‘realist and anti-academic aspirations’ evident since the beginning of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – the belief that the individuality of the model should not be subsumed into the artist's imaginative conception but remain identifiable in the final work (Prettejohn 2006: 28, 26) – Jane Morris seemed to many indistinguishable from the characters and the scenarios in which she was posed. Her capacity to represent apparently contradictory female types and characters from myth, history and literature was predominantly attributed to her ‘face of arcane and inexhaustible meaning’ which inspired the artistic genius of Rossetti, according to William Michael Rossetti: