Millais was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of English artists who came together in 1848 with the goal of renewing British painting.

Her upholstered stool and the table are set before a Gothic window with stained glass, through which can be seen a garden with leaves that are turning from green to autumnal brown.

In the background, a small triptych, a silver casket, and candles are set out as a devotional altar on a piece of furniture covered with white cloth beside the curtain of a bed.

The stained glass in the window shows an Annunciation scene, with the Angel Gabriel and the Virgin Mary, based on a window at the east end of the chapel of Merton College, Oxford, and also an invented coat of arms with a snowdrop and the Latin motto "In coelo quies" ("In Heaven there is rest"), possibly a reference to the feast of St Agnes' Eve and John Keats's poem The Eve of St Agnes.

An anecdote reports that the mouse was drawn from life – or rather death, as it was killed by Millais after it scurried across the floor and hid behind some furniture so he could immortalise it.

The Mariana depicted by Millais is placed in a scene filled with vibrant colours; she is not the forlorn woman described by Tennyson, unwilling to live an independent life, confined to a dilapidated retreat, with a "mouldering wainscots".

Tennyson's Mariana and Gaskell's main character Ruth are both sensitive to the sounds around them and constantly look out of their windows in an image that represents their imprisonment within their homes.

In 1851, Ruskin wrote in defence of the PRB that it "lays in our England the foundations of a school of art nobler than the world has seen for 300 years".

"[5] The painting was accepted in lieu of £4.2m of inheritance tax payable on the estate of Roger Makins, 1st Baron Sherfield, who died in 1996.