A Look at Poet Elizabeth Siddall, Muse to Pre-Raphaelites

Alison Flood introduces readers of The Guardian to a new collection of poetry by Pre-Raphaelite muse Elizabeth Siddall's. The book is edited by Dr. Serena Trowbridge. "Her pale face floating amongst the reeds, Elizabeth Siddall is best remembered as the pre-Raphaelite muse depicted as Ophelia by John Everett Millais, and as the wife and muse of artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Flood writes. "But the 19th-century icon was a poet in her own right, and her haunting writing is set to be published for the first time in accord with her original manuscripts, more than 150 years after her death." From there: 

Siddall was “discovered” in 1849 while working in a milliners’ shop, aged around 20, by the artist Walter Deverell. Deverell introduced her to the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and she sat as a model for various members of the group, including Rossetti, whom she would later marry. She became an artist herself, with John Ruskin as her patron, but suffered from continuous ill health, enduring a still birth and a later miscarriage before taking an overdose of laudanum and dying at home in 1862. The grieving Rossetti buried many of his own unpublished poems along with her body, later exhuming her so he could recover them.

Memorialised by her husband in his painting Beata Beatrix, and in countless other works, she is, according to Dr Serena Trowbridge, a woman who “has come to be represented purely by her face”. But Trowbridge, a senior lecturer in English literature at Birmingham City University, hopes her forthcoming book, My Ladys Soul: The Poetry of Elizabeth Siddall, which features some of Siddall’s best-known work along with fragments of previously unseen poems, will prompt a reassessment of Siddall as a poet.

Learn more at The Guardian.