MORRIS, May
English needlework artist and designer, second daughter of William Morris and Jane Morris. Brought up in London, she was educated at home until 1874. Her aptitude for art surfaced in her teens, and she attended the South Kensington School of Design from 1880 to 1883. In 1885 she took on responsibility for the embroidery section of her father’s business.
She was, with her father, chief designer of textiles at Morris, Marshall, Faulker & Co. (with wallpaper as her second string, e.g. Honeysuckle, 1883). She made many of the products herself and was especially involved in the making of the textile pieces for the annual Arts and Crafts Exhibitions from 1888. Of her family, she was the only one who both designed and worked in embroidery. May Morris became a leading name in the Arts and Crafts Movement of the 1880s and 1890s (despite its intermittent discrimination against women), writing on her craft (notably Decorative Needlework, 1893), as well as teaching it. She joined her father in the nascent English Socialist movement of the 1880s, becoming close to Eleanor Marx, her partner Edward Aveling and George Bernard Shaw in the more radical wing, the Socialist League. After a flirtation with Shaw, she married fellow activist Harry Sparling in 1890. A revival of her attraction to Shaw in 1893 led to her separation from Sparling, which resulted in divorce in 1898.
After her father died in 1896, she did not inherit the business and from then on functioned as a freelance craft artist, teacher and writer, adding silversmithing and the making of jewellery to her portfolio. From 1899 she was connected with the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London, becoming head of its embroidery department in 1899, and gave occasional lectures on her specialism around the country and in the USA (1909-10). She was also a leading light in the Women’s Guild of Arts (founded 1907) for 30 years.
Between 1901 and 1915 she edited her father’s collected works into 24 volumes, wrote further on her specialist field, tried her hand at play-writing (White Lies, 1903) and in 1936 published a two-volume biography of her father.