Throughout most of 1871 Rossetti was writing and painting; he became, with William Morris, a co-tenant of Kelmscott Manor, bringing him close to Jane Morris and also to the two Morris daughters. In October the name of Robert Buchanan enters the letters as the likely author of "The Fleshly School of Poetry", and an alarming unease can be sensed.

The wider world of Victorian London is present: Turgenev comes to dinner, Browning sends his new volumes, Swinburne arrives drunk, and the American poet and adventurer Joaquin Miller makes himself known to the Rossetti circle. Nine appendices include five devoted to Poems and one to the Fleshly School controversy.