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.