In a sense, Jane Burden has no history: as a working-class woman, she appears on stage, as it were, with the anecdote of her ‘discovery’ in an Oxford theatre audience in 1857, called into being by the desiring gaze of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ever seeking a new ‘stunner’ to embody his aesthetic vision (see Burne-Jones 1904: 168). Soon after this event, she was re-made, re-created: through her marriage to William Morris in 1859 she became Jane Morris, a process that – like the legal concept of coverture – effectively erased her former identity as she was transformed from a working-class woman into a middle-class wife. In another sense, however, Jane Morris has been burdened by a resilient stereotype attached to her name – the unfaithful wife, the melancholy invalid, the iconic siren – a limited characterisation that, as Richard Aldington suggested, has evoked insufficient curiosity in the ‘Pre-Raff’ biographical tradition. The allusion to her family name – Burden – in the title of this book is intended to signal that, like the refrain in a song, the stories told of Jane Morris have typically involved repetitions, simplistic and persistent, that reiterate an always-already known tale of femininity (desire, betrayal, misery).