In September 1848 three young London art students — Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt — founded a secret society in a Bloomsbury bedroom and signed their pictures with the initials PRB. They were attacking three centuries of European academic painting. Seven paintings from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and its second-generation followers.

A muse is not a model. A model sits for one painting. A muse sits for thirty, and slowly the painter's whole way of seeing rearranges itself around her face. The women below are the ones who reorganised the careers of the men who painted them.

The 19th-century novel and the Pre-Raphaelite painting were made at the same English moment and they answer each other almost on cue. Six Pre-Raphaelite-coded paintings for the reader of Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Henry James — each painting matches the specific emotional register of one specific novel. The reader who loves Jane Eyre or Tess of the d'Urbervilles finds the visual companion.