There is a precedent for the Taylor Wessing portrait prize’s “obsession with red-haired young women” reported by your correspondent Norman Miller (Letters,19 November). In a letter written in October 1859 Elizabeth Gaskell reported her experiences with Dante Gabriel Rossetti at two evening parties: “I consider we got to know Rossetti pretty well … I had a good deal of talk with him, always excepting the times when ladies with beautiful hair came in … It did not signify what we were talking approximately or how agreeable I was; if a specific kind of reddish brown, or crepe wavy hair came in,he was absent in a moment struggling for an introduction to the owner of said head of hair. He is not as mad as a March hare, but hair-mad.”Nothing changes.
Alan Shelston
Bowdon, or Greater ManchesterContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com