The House of Words

Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire was the home of the extraordinary writer, designer and activist William Morris, from 1871 to 1896. The House of Words explores Kelmscott in all its many guises—as a house of expectation and creativity, as well as a house of love and desire. As such, it was a setting for the tormented triangular relationship between William and Jane Morris and the poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. But it also asks the universal question of what houses mean to all of us, and finally what Morris’s legacy means to the England of now, struggling to define itself between the pull of the past and the invitation of the future.