As a child and a teenager, Evelyn de Morgan wrote poetry and short stories, which have been unpublished and are held in manuscript form by the De Morgan Foundation. These are now available in a recently-published book, edited by Serena Trowbridge, and this lecture will explore the poems included in the book, and what they tell us about De Morgan as a person, a painter and indeed a poet. De Morgan clearly had a taste for Gothic, for melodrama and for mythology, which makes her poems entertaining reading, as well as indicating the wide-ranging education she received.

Dr Serena Trowbridge is Chair of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and Senior Vice-President of the Birmingham & Midland Institute. She is Reader in Victorian Literature at Birmingham City University, and has published widely on the poetry of the Pre-Raphaelites, including Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Siddall, William Morris and now Evelyn De Morgan.