This painting is based on a poem by Tennyson based on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. In the story, Mariana is to marry Angelo, but her dowry is lost in a shipwreck. So, without a dowry and without a husband, she spends five years in a moated grange. However, there is a happy ending when she is reunited with Angelo.

When the painting was first exhibited, only these lines from Tennyson's poem  were with it:

She only said, 'My life is dreary,

He cometh not,'  she said;

She said, 'I am aweary, aweary,

I would that I were dead!'

Mariana, 1851

The Matkins Collection