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The woman here is Jane Morris, wife of Rossetti's friend and colleague William Morris, and by 1874 she and Rossetti were deeply entangled. They spent summers together at a country house while she returned to her husband in winter, and that divided life is the whole point of the myth he chose for her. Proserpine was carried off to the underworld and, because she ate a few pomegranate seeds there, had to spend part of every year below and part above. She holds that fruit, cut open, near the centre. Rossetti worked at this subject obsessively across eight canvases over seven years, and even designed the frame with its pomegranate roundels. In the panel at the upper right he wrote out a sonnet of his own about longing and a light glimpsed from far off.