WMR kept track of his poem's progress in the . He first conceived of the idea for the poem on September 12, 1849, while on vacation on the Isle of Wight. WMR enjoyed several meditative walks which likely contributed to his setting the poem in an English seaside resort. The first draft was completed within the month.

WMR revised his poem between October 1849 and February 1850, and again during November and December 1867 before its publication. However, the specific content of his revisions are difficult to trace, as neither manuscripts nor proof copies are known to have survived. What we do know comes from exchanges of letters and WMR's own notes in the and his diary.

By early October 1849, WMR was sharing his poem in drafts and recitations with contemporaries. DGR, traveling with Holman Hunt in Europe, enthusiastically requested the manuscript by mail and soon replied with their extensive commentary (Family Letters, II, 63-66). Their first recommendation was to change the title; WMR complied, and “An Exchange of News” became “A Plain Story of Life.” Paragraph by paragraph, DGR makes a variety of suggestions on word choice, avoiding the “awkward” and “rather common” and instead aiming “to increase the force” with “newer” and “more strikingly truthful” language. DGR's own poetic commitments emerge in his criticism, as he warns off WMR from descriptions and phrasing that are melodramatic, Tennysonian, or—apparently far worse—Gallic. By and large, the letter praises the poem and WMR's efforts: “a very clever and finished piece of writing,—wonderfully well-managed in parts and possessing some strong points of character. [...] your poem is very remarkable, and altogether certainly the best thing you have done. It is a painful story, told without compromise, and with very little moral, I believe, beyond commonplaces. ” (66)

Fredeman notes that WMR took some but not all of his brother's suggestions on revisions ( 116). WMR recited his poem to John Lucas Tupper, who in turn consulted with a medical man to confirm, WMR wrote, the “scientific requirements for the death of the woman [...:] ‘congestion and effusion of the ventricle’ is the right term. This will adapt itself to rhythm with all ease” ( 32). In November, he recited it to Millais and offered the manuscript to Patmore—who was perhaps predisposed to dislike it, considering “the age of narrative poetry to be passed for ever” ( 27). As WMR learned through the grapevine, Patmore was not impressed. Where DGR admired the absence of cloying sentiment and morality, Patmore “finds a most objectionable absence of moral dignity, all the characters being puny and destitute of elevation” (PRBJ 25).

WMR continued on, making corrections to accentuate the poem's “newspaper fidelity,” and sent the manuscript to William Bell Scott in January 1850 ( 43). Scott did not condone the experiment. As WMR noted, “[h]e evidently looks on it as a curiosity out of his line of thought and poetic faith, not wanting in good description, but exceptional and wrong in delineation of character” ( 47). By February, WMR seems to have conceded. In a reply to Scott, he humbled himself as naïve: “[I] now feel convinced that it is almost too ambitious, before a somewhat extended experience of real life, to attempt the embodiment of what is likely to strike as a metaphysical paradox” (Peattie 12). The last straw may have been the reaction of Joseph Wrightson, who looked upon the poem “as more than half intentionally comic” (PRBJ 58). “A Plain Story of Life” went into a long dormancy.

In 1867, WMR received a letter from Edmund Routledge soliciting literary contents for his fledgling monthly magazine, . WMR balked at the overwrought prospectus, but Routledge wrote him again in October promising a renewed character to the magazine, more serious contributors, and commercial success (Peattie 181-182). WMR agreed and dug up his blank-verse poem, though confessing to Swinburne in a letter that “any 2 lines out of 3 need some amount of modification” (Peattie 182). By this point, WMR was referring to the poem as “The Coroner's Inquest,” and eventually settled upon “Mrs. Holmes Grey” for publication. WMR also felt the need to append an explanatory note—almost an apologia—to the end of the published version of “Mrs. Holmes Grey.” This note deprecates his “unpractised hand” and his poetic “experiment”, admitting that the poem has been published “not indeed without some revision, but without the least alteration in its general character and point of view” ( 459). The note may extend WMR's misgivings about the poem's original reception, or his worries for the lost context of the poem's composition.

After its publication, “Mrs. Holmes Grey” elicited only one formal review. In the last of his three-part series on the Rossettis for , H. Buxton Forman spent the better part of his article on WMR panning “Mrs. Holmes Grey.” Forman's admiration for the Rossettis notwithstanding, the article targets “the theory of the preraphaelites” that simple materials will augment the caliber of artistic production (276). As for “Mrs. Holmes Grey”, Forman cannot abide the non-poetic language. He denigrates it as “sensational literature” barely differing from “carefully-written prose” (277).

WMR denied that the review bothered him, telling Swinburne of his detachment from the poem (Peattie 232). Swinburne, for his part, overflowed with praise for WMR. Swinburne gave “Mrs. Holmes Grey” several close readings and wrote: “I now take leave to tell you honestly that it seems to me not only good but great in quality. [...I]t is the only thorough and poetic piece of domestic tragedy wrought out since Balzac—except of course Flaubert” (Lang 28). Even though WMR considered this a “superfluously enthusiastic letter” and that Forman's review was “nearer the mark”, he was grateful, perhaps even persuaded to continue writing poetry ( 297; 1: 82). When he asked DGR what kind of poetry to pursue, DGR advised him “to go on the same tack” as “Mrs. Holmes Grey”. Considering his hiatus from poetry until beginning the in 1881, WMR may not have concurred (Roll-Hansen 7).

“Mrs. Holmes Grey” languished in relative obscurity after its initial publication. In 1974, amid his efforts to rekindle critical comment about the PRB, William Fredeman suggested that “Mrs. Holmes Grey” possesses “a documentary significance that overshadows its literary shortcomings” (159). Fredeman uses to poem to complicate evaluations of Pre-Raphaelite poetics typically based upon works like “The Blessed Damozel” (149-150). Following on Fredeman's claims, Roll-Hansen sees “Mrs. Holmes Grey” as a window into the dispassionate naturalism and philosophical positions of WMR and early Pre-Raphaelitism.

“Mrs. Holmes Grey” was originally slated for the fourth number of ( 43), but, because of the periodical's early demise and lukewarm response to the poem, it was not included. WMR did not again actively seek to publish the poem, even when encouraged by George Meredith in 1861 (Fredeman, “Key Poem” 152). After agreeing to Routledge's proposals, “Mrs. Holmes Grey” was printed in the sixth number of The Broadway Annual (February 1868 issue). The publisher's records indicate a run of 30,000 copies. Although lists its places of publication as London and New York, Ives has pointed out that no records exist to confirm an American printing (90). “Mrs. Holmes Grey” has since been republished only once, as an appendix to Fredeman's edition of the (1975).

Fredeman suggests that “Mrs. Holmes Grey” is stylistically distinct from other pre-Raphaelite poems as “[t]here is no attempt to introduce purely pictorial elements” in it (159). Even so, at least three illustrations were created for the poem. DGR apparently made two sketches for his brother's poem, neither of which has survived. According to the , DGR began a rough sketch on January 16, 1850, intended to accompany its publication in the fourth number of ( 43). When Edmund Routledge agreed to publish it in 1867, he suggested DGR as the illustrator. DGR declined. He did, however, privately make WMR a sketch of the death scene ( 243).

WMR and Routledge agreed upon Arthur Boyd Houghton to illustrate the poem's coffin scene. This woodcut design was printed in on the facing page of “Mrs. Holmes Grey.” WMR sent a note of thanks to Houghton—much to his relief—as he had expected “a ferocious wigging for the illustration” from the then-famous WMR ( 284).

Houghton's illustration places the viewer in a bare room looking over the shoulder of the poem's interlocutor, John Harling, and into the candlelit coffin of Mrs. Holmes Grey, her face and hair barely visible, her gaunt husband standing immediately behind her. With its sightlines converging on the well-lit face in the center, the illustration suggests the fascination with a female corpse that is a frequent feature of Victorian aesthetics.

Thirlwell among other critics has suggested that WMR based his poem on an actual scandal reported in the press (186, fn25). However, no specific cases or news articles are cited. According to WMR, he “sat down to think for a subject for a poem, and, without much trouble, invented one” ( 14).

WMR takes his epigraph from Edgar Poe's short story “” (1843). Poe held great esteem with the PRB, and was celebrated by even Coventry Patmore as the best writer America had produced ( 31). “” is a first-person confessional: a man afflicted by alcoholism and his own madness murders first his cat and then his wife; his second cat gives him away to the police. Poe's story relates to “Mrs. Holmes Grey” in at least two interesting ways: in its narrative procedures and in its investigation of the perverse.

As Poe's narrator explains in the first paragraph, “My purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events” (597). As Poe draws out the complexities of a domestic tragedy, so too did the author of “A Plain Story of Life” devote his poem to the sensation of simplicity and to almost newspaper-like fidelity. WMR's guiding principle was “strict actuality and probability of detail” intent on producing “the actualities of dialogue and narration”.

Through such methods, WMR attempts, like Poe, to illuminate the perverse. In his essay “” (1845), Poe identifies “a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment” that does not fit into moral or religious cosmologies (826). We can find such a sentiment in both the Greys of WMR's poem: Mrs. Holmes Grey is in thrall to Dr. Luton with an irrepressible childhood love that ruins her life; after sitting with her corpse for some days, her husband resolves to ruin Dr. Luton regardless of the exculpatory evidence. Perversity also suggests WMR's interest in the unexplained, motive forces of psychology and aesthetics. In the epigraph from “” selected by WMR, we hear the PRB's declared interests in raw emotion and the first principles in art: “the primitive impulses of the human heart” and the “primary faculties or sentiments [...of] the character of man”. This nexus of perverse psychology and aesthetic principles is the grotesque, which became a perennial sticking point for critics of “Mrs. Holmes Grey” and the PRB at large.

Swinburne suggested to WMR that “in France I think even a poor translation, if literal, would be felt”. Amid his enthusiasm for the poem, he promised to translate “Mrs. Holmes Grey”: “I'd do the drudgery myself gladly: I would indeed and submit the translation to you, lest it should prove a ‘translation-treason’” (Lang 28). Swinburne particularly wanted to share it with Flaubert. However, no such translation exists or was published.

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