Heather Bozant Witcher and Amy Kahrmann Huseby assert the political activism of Pre-Raphaelitism's multimodality in this opening chapter. Through sustained readings of Ford Madox Brown's painting "Work, " Elizabeth Siddall's poem, "Lord, May I Come?, " and Christina Rossetti's sonnet, "A Triad, " Witcher and Huseby demonstrate how the political investments of the Pre-Raphaelites were founded upon a discourse about gender inequality. Turning in the second half of the chapter to the language of the "sister arts, " Witcher and Huseby attempt to annex the gender politics of Pre-Raphaelite poetics with the gendered language that instantiates the movement. In doing so, they stress the genre hybridity of literary Pre-Raphaelitism-the integration of music, art, and poetry-as a political endeavor that upholds the plurality sought by the poet-artists.
