Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal Rossetti
Elizabeth "Lizzie" Siddal's family had once been prominent, but she was working as a milliner's assistant when she met the Pre-Raphaelites. Walter Deverell met her first and was immediately stunned by her beauty. William Rossetti later described her as:
...most beautiful, with an air between dignity & sweetness... She seemed to say-- "My mind and my feelings are my own, and no outsider is expected to pry into them."
Deverell had his mother convince Siddal to pose for him (in Twelfth Night). The artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood quickly discovered that Siddal was no vapid beauty: she could produce paintings and prose with the best of them. By the time Millais was painting her in his famous (and frighteningly realistic) portrait of the drowned Ophelia, Rossetti was in love with her.
His sister Christina wrote "In An Artist's Studio" (below) about her. The Pygmalion aspects are particuarly interesting.
One face looks out from all his canvases,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; --every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright:
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
(In An Artist's Studio Christina Rossetti)
Siddal's delicate health was evident from the beginning. For Millais' Ophelia Siddal lay for hours fully clothed in a tub full of water (heated by lamps, which soon went out). Afterwards, she became ill.
It has been speculated she was anorexic. Later, laudanum was prescribed for her. She might have been depressive. She was obviously very intense. Of one such attack of her mysterious female illness, Rossetti wrote to Ford Madox Brown, "She has seemed ready to die daily & more than once a day."
It is interesting to note that later Rossetti was again entangled with a mysteriously sick woman. What was this disease that caused Victorian women to swoon? Too tight corsets? Oppression? Ennui? Liquor and drugs? Sexual repression? Hunger? Years later in Bloomsbury, Virginia Woolf would go mad, refusing to eat, believing the voices in her head, "It's your overeating, Virginia, that is killing you." Well, something was killing the women: were they really the weaker sex?
Siddal tried to be a successful artist. She tried to strike out independently from Rossetti, but it made her physically sick. She sat in on a art class, something for a woman in those days, but soon had to call on Rossetti to help see her through another bout of illness. I can just hear Eliza Doolittle's plaintive cry in her sad Cockney, "I'm a good girl, I am, I am!"
Siddal and Rossetti had been engaged for seven years. How exactly does a mistress turn herself into a wife? Whether it was thanks to a growing sense of financial security, or because of her repeated illnesses, he finally married her 1860.
Rossetti encouraged her painting and prose, even collaborating with her from time to time. She showed a great, still underrated talent in her ten year career. Ruskin even helped support her artistically for a period before she and Rossetti married. It was common then for patrons to help artists, and in the case of Ruskin and Siddal, there was nothing 'funny' going on-- remember Ruskin was the rather priggish intellectual who was shocked on his wedding night to discover his wife had pubic hair. But Ruskin was another opinionated male and she grew ill, which enabled her to sever her creative tie to him.
Siddal was deeply effected by literature, as were the other Pre-Raphaelites. She used images from Shakespeare, the Bible, poets and balladeers-- but her favorite was obviously Tennyson. In 1855, Mrs Tennyson even tried to get Siddal included in the Moxon Tennyson but was unable to do so, the official reason being that Siddal was too unknown.
What was it like being married to the equally opinionated Rossetti? When I look at Tom Hanks on Oscar night as he wins yet another Oscar, I wonder: what's it like for his wife? She always looks so happy and supportive. How does she do it?
Siddal and Rossetti were married only two years. A year into the marriage, she gave birth prematurely to a stillborn daughter. Stillborn. Siddal sank lower into laudanum and god knows what else. A month after the still birth, Jane Morris gave birth to a healthy daughter. Whereas Mary Shelley seemed able to intellectualize the experience, she wrote Frankenstein, Siddal became more withdrawn. One visitor reported being hushed by Siddal who nodded toward the empty cradle and said, "Ssh, the baby's sleeping."
A few months later, Siddal became pregnant again. This is something many books gloss over. Was she afraid of death by childbirth? Was she afraid of another stillborn child? Was she doing laudanum during this and the other pregnancy? Did she feel guilty and lost, like an overwhelmed young girl in the Planned Parenthood waiting room?
She wasn't that young. She would've been thirty-three. The same age Christ was when he died. Three years younger than Lord Byron and his daughter Ada, who both died --many years apart-- at the ages of thirty-six.
Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862. Rossetti was probably at Fanny Cornforth's, a longtime mistress, when Siddal took an amount well above the prescribed of her 'medicine.' She died the next day. It was ruled an accident, though some say a suicide note had been repressed by a friend of Rossetti's, possibly Hunt. It doesn't matter if was by accident or on purpose, when you're on that road it only goes one way, no matter how you get there.
In 1869, her body was exhumed so that her husband (now having an affair with his best friend's wife) could salvage the poetry he'd impulsively tossed in.
