A note from Amy Sailer for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": I started writing about William and Jane Morris just before getting engaged. Their marriage has given me a rich vocabulary to imagine my own. They built a beautiful home together, Red House, which they intended as an artist’s utopia, where they, their family, and their community of friends could create the home’s medieval-inspired interior decoration, but the experiment fell apart within a few years, in part because Jane fell in love with their friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When I visited Red House, the tour guide called it “a house of indecision.” They had so many unfulfilled projects—I could feel their high expectations and the stress it must have caused them.

I had the opportunity to work on the project at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, where I learned that Morris & Company revolutionized nineteenth-century embroidery. The first half of the century was dominated by Berlin crewel work, a style that employs cross-stitch to fill out predetermined grid patterns. Morris & Company popularized “art embroidery,” a more creative technique, using a variety of stitches to create more organic designs. Both styles of embroidery lead to repetition and redundancy, but to my eyes, repetitive cross-stitches look monotonous and mechanical, while the repetitive patterns in a piece of art embroidery like Jane and Jenny Morris’s “Honeysuckle” look joyful. John Ruskin argues in his essay “The Nature of the Gothic” that redundancy is a sign of pleasure—when we enjoy our work, we keep making more of it. Although we don’t know the names of the women who created so much embroidery, I like to think that redundancy serves as a kind of signature.