The girl who played Ophelia

‘A truly extraordinary achievement,’ trumpets A. N. Wilson on the jacket of this book. In a sense, of course, he is right. Lucinda Hawksley deserves praise for making something substantial out of very little. With the addition of some original research, she has synthesised what is known of Elizabeth Siddal (1829-62), the long-suffering model for Millais’ ‘Ophelia’, the muse and wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and herself a painter and versifier. Hawksley sifts the evidence, commendably trying to unravel truth from legend in order to bring proportion to her subject’s story, one which, boiled down, is not unfamiliar. Nice but difficult working-girl is plucked from obscurity by rising artist; after hot-and-cold years as his ‘mistress’, she marries him and dies soon afterwards at the age of 32, the cause of her ‘accidental’ death being a drugs overdose (in this case laudanum, to which she had long been addicted). Puccini might have made a one-act cracker from this with parts for Christina Rossetti, Ruskin, a chorus of admiring artists and a lyrical interlude in Hastings where Lizzie and D.