William Morris: Selected Writings

This newly selected edition of William Morris’s works brings together poetry and prose, lectures, articles, and letters from his life, ordered chronologically, with an introduction highlighting his pressing and prescient writing on matters of the natural and built environment, human and non-human relations, internationalism, migration, and social justice, as well as the wide range of his literary and artistic concerns. Expert textual notes draw attention to the interconnectedness of Morris’s writing and its rich literary, historical, and political contexts and sources: this is work that reaches back to tales of personal, dynastic, and political passion in medieval Europe or the craftsmanship of ancient Persia as deftly as it lambasts Victorian work practices and living conditions in Britain or sets out to correct misconceptions about the nature of social revolution; it creates visions of a just, equal, and beautiful future from re-told or imagined pasts. This selection includes lyric, epic, and narrative poetry and a range of prose writings that tell stories, conjure worlds, rouse their readers to action, and urge them to care for the earth, its inhabitants, its beauty, and its histories. It demonstrates the continuing power of Morris’s writings to speak to the present with as lively, particular, and provocative a voice as it spoke to its own time.

Ingrid Hanson, Lecturer in English Literature, University of Manchester

Ingrid Hanson took her first degree at Cambridge and returned to academia after fifteen years working in journalism, freelance writing, and community teaching, gaining her PhD from the University of Sheffield in 2011. She has taught at the universities of Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam, and Hull and is currently Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Manchester. She has published work on William Morris, Victorian medievalism, masculinities, Victorian socialist poetry and periodicals, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century anti-war literature. She has spoken about William Morris as an expert guest on Radio 4’s In Our Time and on Radio 3’s The Essay.