This is a portrait of the pre-Raphaelites and the women they loved and painted. Much has been written about the lives and works of Dante Gabriel Rosetti, John Everett Millais, Holman Hunt, Edmund Burne-Jones and William Morris, but the women they celebrated in their paintings are still mysteries to us. The author questions who they were and what happened when they climbed down off their pedestals and back into real life. Because the group was so close and their stories all interwoven and because taking up with these artists in the first place all these women were defying convention and seriously jeopardizing their reputations this book reads like a High Victorian soap opera, with its scandals, betrayed lovers, secret dalliances, endless engagements, stormy marriages and suicide.