Meanwhile, in the summer of i860 both Rossetti and Burne-Jones also married, Rossetti to Lizzie Siddal, the neu- rotic and perpetually ailing redhead to whom he had been so long engaged, Burne-Jones to Georgiana Macdonald (1840- 1920; fig. 54), the twenty-year-old daughter of a Methodist minister whom he had known since the early 1850s, when her father was stationed in Birmingham. Georgie was one of a remarkable galaxy of sisters who would eventually link Burne- Jones, the classical painter Edward Poynter (1836 — 1919), and two great men of the next generation, Rudyard Kipling and Stanley Baldwin, by ties of marriage. Unlike Jane Morris and Lizzie Rossetti, she did not possess great beauty. Small, with a simple, neat elegance, she reminded Charles Eliot Norton of "a Stothard Grace," 16 especially when she sang and played the piano, which she did extremely well. What she lacked in appearance, however, was amply made up for in strength of character and an unswerving moral rectitude which could make even the strongest quail. The marriage was far from being without its problems. Burne-Jones placed it under enormous strain by his affair with the Greek beauty Maria Zambaco (cat. no. 49) in the late 1860s, and Georgie s relentless high-mindedness could get on his nerves, especially in later life when it took a socialistic turn under the influence of Morris. Graham Robertson believed that Burne-Jones’s addiction to Rabelaisian caricatures was a reaction against his surroundings, which were "so extremely correct and proper.'" 17 But there was never any danger of the marriage collapsing. The couple retained a deep fund of mutual affection, and no doubt Burne-Jones knew only too well how much he depended on Georgie. Not only did she run their household with great efficiency but she acted as his personal assistant, writing many of his letters, relieving him of all busi- ness worries, and zealously protecting him from intruders. Lady Frances Balfour (cat. no. 108) described her as "the guardian of B-J s time, and a very inexorable one," adding that she found her "rather daunting." 18 When Burne-Jones boast- ed, as he often did, of being what today would be called a workaholic, he was paying an unspoken tribute to Georgie, without whose support he would never have been able to spend the long hours in his studio that enabled him to be so prolific. After his death she rendered him the final service of compiling one of the best of the memorial biographies that were accorded to nearly every major Victorian artist.