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. G. R. were eventually married.

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The coda to Lizzie’s death forms one of the most grisly yet farcical episodes in the Pre-Raphaelite saga. This was the retrieval from Lizzie’s grave, seven years after her interment, of a unique manuscript of Rossetti’s poems, an act carried out with the connivance of the Home Secretary. Witness- es said that Lizzie’s body was unchanged and that her notably luxuriant red hair, having kept growing after her death, now lined the coffin. During the nocturnal exhumation, Rossetti lurked in a house in Fulham, probably even then thinking how to sell the film rights to Ken Russell.

It forms a suitable ending to this chronicle of ill health, procrastination, frustrated love, drug addiction, inter-group jealousies and thwarted ambition.