An artist in her own right: the genius of Elizabeth Siddal

Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti, as this new book calls her in a break with convention, is better known by her maiden name: Elizabeth Siddal or Siddall (the spelling is uncertain, as is much else about her). The Pre-Raphaelite icon was familiar to the public as the model for John Everett Millais’s ‘Ophelia’ sinking to her watery grave and as the muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who eventually married her. Not long afterwards she died of an opiate overdose in 1862, aged 32.

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Her early demise, echoing her association with Ophelia, left her ripe for myth-making, as first explored by Jan Marsh in her groundbreaking The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1989). By the fin de siècle, the late Mrs Rossetti was a pin-up for the Decadent movement, a glamorised compound of beauty and death; in the 1920s, Violet Hunt’s biography plumbed a nadir of sensationalist fabrication; by the mid-20th century, Siddal had literally become a fictional character, featuring in novel after novel with fanciful titles ranging from Angel with Bright Hair (1957) to Pale as the Dead (2002).

It was only from the 1980s that serious attention gradually began to be paid to an aspect of Siddal that had previously been sidelined: the fact that she had been not just a model but an artist in her own right. Glenda Youde’s study, drawing on the work of Marsh and others, takes that scholarship further by offering detailed art-historical analysis to suggest that Siddal’s imaginative input was more central to the Pre-Raphaelite project than has previously been supposed.

Youde begins by sifting the facts from the fictions, noting how retellings of the ‘Lizzie Siddal’ narrative tend to reduce it to a few anecdotes, some based in reality, others not.