Katherine, imagined

 

 

The Accolade (1901) by Edmund Blair Leighton

Used in current paperback edition .

Crop of Veronica Veronese (1872) by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Chicago Review Press edition published in 2004. 

I tend to imagine quite erroneously Katherine Swynford as a Pre-Raphaelite stunner.I know, of course, that this tells us far more about me — and about Victorian painters — than it ever can about the real Katherine, born in the 1340s into a very different visual world. Yet images have a way of lodging themselves in the mind, quietly shaping how we picture the past.

Two paintings in particular have always hovered at the edge of my imagination.The first is Edmund Blair Leighton’s The Accolade (1901), so often reproduced on editions of Anya Seton’s Katherine. It is an unapologetically romantic, late-Victorian vision of the Middle Ages: ritualised, ceremonial, drenched in chivalric nostalgia. Historically it tells us nothing about Katherine Swynford, it is almost certain Katherine never ‘knighted’ anyone, its armour, costume and even the act it depicts are centuries out of place — yet emotionally it has proved remarkably persuasive. It offers a medieval world softened, ennobled, and lit by idealised love.

The second image is far more intimate: a cropped detail from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Veronica Veronese (1872), also used on later covers of Seton’s novel. This is unmistakably Pre-Raphaelite — heavy-lidded eyes, copper-red hair, parted lips, a sense of interior life just beyond reach. The model was Alexa Wilding, one of Rossetti’s most recognisable sitters, whose features recur across his late work. It is her face, rather than any documented description, that has come to stand in for Katherine in the popular imagination.

That influence is personal as well as cultural. A large print of Alexa Wilding as La Ghirlandata has hung in my hall for many years. Day after day, I pass that unmistakable Rossettian profile: the cascade of hair, the absorbed stillness, the quiet authority of beauty rendered as something almost spiritual. It would be disingenuous to pretend that this has not seeped into how I picture Katherine — not as a documentary likeness, but asNone of this, of course, is evidence. The real Katherine Swynford left us no portrait, no physical description we can rely upon. She was not a Pre-Raphaelite muse, not a Victorian fantasy of medieval womanhood. She was a fourteenth-century gentlewoman who lived a long, complex life shaped by politics, motherhood, loss, and survival.

La Ghirlandata (1873) modelled by Alexa Wilding, by Dante Gabriel

And yet, when we imagine her, we do so through the visual language available to us. For many of us, that language has been shaped by Rossetti’s women and by the romantic medievalism of the nineteenth century. The danger lies not in acknowledging this influence, but in forgetting that it is an influence — a lens, not a window.

So yes, in my mind’s eye Katherine is still a Pre-Raphaelite stunner. I hold that image lightly, aware of its artifice, even as I recognise how powerfully it has framed my emotional connection to her