The Novel on Blue Paper by William Morris - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)

By William Morris

This eBook features the unabridged text of ‘The Novel on Blue Paper by William Morris - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’ from the bestselling edition of ‘The Complete Works of William Morris’.

Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. The Delphi Classics edition of Morris includes original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of the author, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

eBook features:
* The complete unabridged text of ‘The Novel on Blue Paper by William Morris - Delphi Classics (Illustrated)’
* Beautifully illustrated with images related to Morris’s works
* Individual contents table, allowing easy navigation around the eBook
* Excellent formatting of the textPlease visit www.delphiclassics.com to learn more about our wide range of titles

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Jul 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781788777032

William Morris

William Morris (1834-1896) was an English designer, poet, novelist, and socialist. Born in Walthamstow, Essex, he was raised in a wealthy family alongside nine siblings. Morris studied Classics at Oxford, where he was a member of the influential Birmingham Set. Upon graduating, he married embroiderer Jane Burden and befriended prominent Pre-Raphaelites Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With Neo-Gothic architect Philip Webb, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, he designed the Red House in Bexleyheath, where he would live with his family from 1859 until moving to London in 1865. As a cofounder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner, & Co., he was one of the Victorian era’s preeminent interior decorators and designers specializing in tapestries, wallpaper, fabrics, stained glass, and furniture. Morris also found success as a writer with such works as The Earthly Paradise (1870), News from Nowhere (1890), and The Well at the World’s End (1896). A cofounder of the Socialist League, he was a committed revolutionary socialist who played a major part in the growing acceptance of Marxism and anarchism in English society.

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The Complete Works of

WILLIAM MORRIS

VOLUME 11 OF 45

The Novel on Blue Paper

Parts Edition

By Delphi Classics, 2015

Version 1

COPYRIGHT

‘The Novel on Blue Paper’

William Morris: Parts Edition (in 45 parts)

First published in the United Kingdom in 2017 by Delphi Classics.

© Delphi Classics, 2017.

All rights reserved.  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78877 703 2

Delphi Classics

is an imprint of

Delphi Publishing Ltd

Hastings, East Sussex

United Kingdom

Contact: [e-mail]

www.delphiclassics.com

William Morris: Parts Edition

This eBook is Part 11 of the Delphi Classics edition of William Morris in 45 Parts. It features the unabridged text of The Novel on Blue Paper from the bestselling edition of the author’s Complete Works. Having established their name as the leading publisher of classic literature and art, Delphi Classics produce publications that are individually crafted with superior formatting, while introducing many rare texts for the first time in digital print. Our Parts Editions feature original annotations and illustrations relating to the life and works of William Morris, as well as individual tables of contents, allowing you to navigate eBooks quickly and easily.

Visit here to buy the entire Parts Edition of William Morris or the Complete Works of William Morris in a single eBook.

Learn more about our Parts Edition, with free downloads, via this link or browse our most popular Parts here.

WILLIAM MORRIS

IN 45 VOLUMES

Parts Edition Contents

The Novels

1, A Dream of John Ball

2, The House of the Wolfings

3, The Roots of the Mountains

4, News from Nowhere

5, The Story of the Glittering Plain

6, The Wood Beyond the World

7, Child Christopher and Goldilind the Fair

8, The Well at the World’s End

9, The Water of the Wondrous Isles

10, The Sundering Flood

11, The Novel on Blue Paper

The Shorter Fiction

12, Introduction to the Fantasy Short Stories of Morris

13, The Hollow Land

14, A King’s Lesson

15, Golden Wings and Other Stories

16, The Folk of the Mountain Door

The Play

17, The Tables Turned; Or, Nupkins Awakened

The Poetry Collections

18, The Defence of Guenevere, and Other Poems

19, The Life and Death of Jason

20, The Earthly Paradise

21, Love Is Enough

22, The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs

23, The Pilgrims of Hope

24, Chants for Socialists

25, Alfred Linnell, Killed in Trafalgar Square. a Death Song

26, Poems by the Way

27, Unpublished Poems and Fragments

The Translations

28, Grettis Saga

29, The Saga of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Rafn the Skald

30, Völsung Saga

31, Three Northern Love Stories, and Other Tales

32, The Odyssey of Homer Done Into English Verse

33, The Aeneids of Virgil Done Into English

34, The Tale of Beowulf Done Out of the Old English Tongue

35, The Ordination of Knighthood

36, Old French Romances Done Into English

The Non-Fiction

37, Signs of Change

38, Preface to ‘Arts and Crafts Essays by Members of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society’

39, Hopes and Fears for Art

40, Preface to ‘Mediaeval Lore from Bartholomew Anglicus’

41, The Art and Craft of Printing

Designs

42, Morris & Co. Textile Designs

43, Morris & Co. Stained Glass Designs

44, Oil Painting

The Biography

45, The Life of William Morris by John William Mackail

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The Novel on Blue Paper

This unfinished novel was begun in the early 1870’s. Set in the then present day, it is highly uncharacteristic of Morris’ work, adhering to utopian concerns and fantasy mediaevalist settings. It was eventually published in 1982, in an edition edited by Penelope Fitzgerald, who gave the novel its published title, after the blue foolscap paper on which the manuscript was written. The story involves a love triangle between two brothers and a young woman named Clara – a situation that echoed a similar love triangle in which Morris was embroiled whilst writing the fragment, between himself, his wife Jane and his friend Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Cover of the first published edition, 1982

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I. THE VILLAGE OF ORMSLADE

CHAPTER II. THE RECTORY

CHAPTER III. MRS RISLEY’S SECRET

CHAPTER IV. ELEANOR’S VISIT

CHAPTER V. THE TWO LADS

CHAPTER VI. IN THE GARDEN — OLD JACK’S STORY

CHAPTER VII. FATHER AND SON

CHAPTER VIII. UP THE STREAM

CHAPTER IX. THE ALOE BLOSSOMS

CHAPTER X. CLARA AND HER MOTHER

CHAPTER XI. HOW THE DAY ENDED

CHAPTER XII. CLARA’S LETTER

CHAPTER XIII. THE PLEASURE-PARTY: THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER XIV. THE PLEASURE-PARTY: THE END

CHAPTER XV. JOHN LEAVES HOME

Frontispiece of the first edition

Jane Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti – Morris’ wife and friend, whose affair inspired the events of this unfinished novel

CHAPTER I. THE VILLAGE OF ORMSLADE

Our story begins in a village not so very far from London, yet in a country out of the tracks of the busiest people, and at any rate, for whatsoever reason, with a remote and unchanging air about it, that put it beyond dullness, and made the commonplace people, who wore away their monotonous and thoughtless lives there seem to the dreamy wanderer through the streets as if they must deal with a different code of right and wrong, different ways of hope and fear and pleasure and pain than him.

It was an old village of middling size, with no squire’s house in it or near it, because a very great lord’s house some five miles off swallowed up all the land thereabout; the rectory, on the other hand, was rich, and the rector served for squire in this village of Ormslade, which stood nearly on the borders of rich grazing country and a strange open waste, sometimes wooded and sometimes bare, called Scolton Chase. Old as the village street was it looked still older, for, in that country of good building stone, people kept building decent houses with little mullioned windows a good hundred years later than in most parts of England, and the houses here were mostly built of this brown stone with slate roofs.

A queer little old red-brick house with stiff iron railings and two yards of garden along its front had a brass plate on the door and held the doctor; another red brick house, as small, and not lacking the railings and garden, but new, and with a blue slate roof, had a general shop below, and rooms where the curate lodged above; another, originally made of two of the ordinary houses knocked into one, had been taken possession of by a retired skipper, who had long spent his days in building rockwork about the garden, fowl-houses and statues like castles in wood and plaster, and an arbour with a dome to it. The other houses were all of one type, only differing being bigger or smaller, and in some of them having little gardens in front which most lacked, the little white-haired freckled children building their mud-pies right up against the brown stone walls of them; the village inn was not among the biggest; it stood back a little from the road, a big pollard elm in front of the door with a circular bench round its roots, and the sign thrust out from halfway up its bole, where one could still dimly see the two white harts and the bugle of the Scolton arms.

Near its end the long street was cut across by a road, the northern arm of which led up through rising ground to the Chase, the southern into the heart of the undulating hedged meadow land; just down this road lay the Rectory first, and then the church; the Rectory a handsome old stone house, with a garden whose long high wall ran alongside the road, and had a square turret-like pleasure arbour at the corner of it, a common fashion thereabouts. The church and church yard ended the village on that side: and the ground sloped quickly away from them into fields, heavily hedged as afore said. Looking from the crazy paling of the churchyard one might see the rich countryside, not very far indeed, for it soon swelled up into a hedged slope again, a patchwork at