The Wayward Muse by Elizabeth Hickey

17 year-old Jane Burden lives in poverty with her family in 1850's Oxford. While at the theatre with her sister, she is discovered by Dante Gabriel Rossetti who wants her to pose for him. After much relunctance from her horrible mother, Jane is sitting for Rossetti who considers her his new muse. They then fall passionately in love, but she ends up marrying William Morris, founder of the English Arts and Crafts movement. The Wayward Muse is the story of Jane's life from the time she meets the individuals of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood until about twenty years later. I loved the book and its insights into the behind-the-scenes lives of these Victorian poets and painters. It was interesting to see it all through the eyes of a poor girl who happened just by chance to be part of something so important. Other novels I've enjoyed that feature artists and writers include Johanna: a Novel of the Van Gogh Family by Claire Cooperstein and Vindication by Frances Sherwood about Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist and mother of Mary Shelley.