Elizabeth Siddal has always been a contentious figure, and assessing her significance is a problematic task. Best known as a Pre-Raphaelite “stunner,” a “supermodel” whose face appears throughout the Brethren’s paintings and illustrations, she was Dante Rossetti’s muse, wife, mother of their child, a drug addict and a tragic suicide. She was also, of course, the victim of an extraordinary act of desecration when her husband put a manuscript of his poems in her coffin and later arranged for her grave to be opened and the papers retrieved.
These life – and death – events define her place as a key presence in the Pre-Raphaelites’ story as a mythologized beauty, but recent critics have argued that she contributed to the movement as a creator in her own right, producing a small body of paintings, illustrations, and poetry. Jan Marsh has explored her role as a painter-poet in her groundbreaking book, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (1992), and Serena Trowbridge has written insightfully of Siddal’s verse in a collection of her poems (2018). Both critics stress the value of her work despite her lack of formal training and limited education, and it is now widely accepted that Siddal was a significant influence on some of Rossetti’s artworks, notably providing visual exemplars for his illustrations in the celebrated “Moxon Tennyson” (1857), even when she was not able to contribute herself.
Rossetti's drawing of a melancholy Siddal in 1854.
These approaches aim to rehabilitate Siddal and place her, as a feminist heroine, within the context of the Pre-Raphaelites’ male hegemony. In this reading she is very much the frustrated artist-poet, held in place by sexism and the expectations of a patriarchal culture. This claim informs Anne Woolley’s approach in her new study, The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context.
Woolley sets out to re-assess and re-establish Siddal’s significance as a poet in her own right, seeking, as the title indicates, to demonstrate her importance by placing her within a series of Victorian contexts. In Woolley’s terms, her book “undertakes [an] appraisal of [the writer] in a number of new ways … that allows her work [to be examined] from perspectives not previously associated with her name’ (14); in particular, Woolley explores the “intertextual relationship with Dante Rossetti, Swinburne, Tennyson, Ruskin and Keats” in order to “throw new light” on Siddal’s status and so “enhance and consolidate [her] reputation as a poet” (10). The author also draws on Siddal’s artwork as a point of comparison and links her poetry to ideas in Rossetti’s paintings.
This is an ambitious project, embracing everything from biographical detail to cultural developments, and Woolley organizes her material into four dense chapters, in each case considering Siddal’s relationship to an issue or theme as it was expressed in the work of her Victorian contemporaries. In the opening chapter the focus is on the “duality of love” (16) and explores the connections between Siddal’s verse and Dante Rossetti’s treatment of love’s ambivalence in his sonnet sequence, “The House of Life”; chapter two considers Siddal’s response to the ballad tradition, and compares her work to Algernon Swinburne’s; three looks at “the feminist question” (143), linking Siddal’s verse to Tennyson’s “The Princess” and Ruskin’s patronage of her artwork; and four examines “relations of power” (196) as they are expressed in the poetry of Keats and how they might be echoed in Siddal’s poetry.
Woolley covers a lot of ground and reveals a great deal about Siddal’s life along with insightful analysis of the poems. Without doubt, the critic expands understanding of the poet’s work and its relationship to at least some of the contexts in which it was written. Nevertheless, many of the arguments are undermined by the mismatch between pages of detailed discussion of the contexts and far too little on the specific ways in which Siddal could be said to be linked to those contexts; the framing material consistently overwhelms the poems themselves. The section “Religious Love” exemplifies the problem, which opens with discussion of contemporary debates, but does not turn to Siddal for four pages; having given so much detail on theological and religious debates, we are eventually told that “little is known about Siddal’s religious faith” (54) and that her poems do not include explicit religious content and do not engage in theological debates. If that is the case, then there is no point in including the previous material, which is rendered irrelevant.
There is also a consistent reliance on speculation. Woolley works hard to enhance Siddal’s status, but in so doing she makes many unsubstantiated claims. It is surely debatable, for example, that in withholding her paintings from Ruskin, her patron, she was resisting his attempts to impose “a childlike status and dependence” (167) on female artists as if she were engaged in an heroic struggle to champion women’s rights; in fact, there is no evidence as to what she was thinking and she may have stopped the arrangement for many other reasons, not least because she was limited by her lack of professional training. Woolley stresses Siddal’s frustrating situation, but at the same time accords her an artistic and social self-awareness that is not borne out by the known facts. Nor is it true that Siddal was so absolutely a victim of her male companions, who are too often disparaged and judged. Woolley’s hostile attitude to Rossetti is especially misleading, an attitude exemplified by her comment on Siddal’s loss of a child — “stillborn of her daughter” (1). Surely the expression is their daughter?
What we are left with is an exploration of some of the ways in which an unpublished amateur, essentially a naïve writer, was bound by some of the ideas of her time. This is not to disparage the verse – which could not be published in its own time, because it was marred by poor punctuation, grammatical errors and a general incompleteness. Nor is it to dismiss Woolley’s offering of a novel, and potentially fruitful new approach; for sure, reading women’s poetry in its original cultural setting is a valid avenue of investigation which could be applied to many of the accomplished, and neglected, female writers of the nineteenth century. But Siddal’s poetry remains a slight creation, and claiming that her work is a complex reflection of contemporary contexts is a difficult case to make when those poems are obviously minor creations. They certainly have their interest, but they do not support, or justify, this sort of analysis.
Links to Related Material
- Siddal's grave in Highgate Cemetery (and the story of its desecration)
- Siddal as one of Rossetti's Real "Fair Ladies""
Bibliography
[Book under review] Woolley, Anne. The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context. Manchester: Manchester University Press, reissue 2024.
Marsh, Jan.The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal. London: Quartet, 1992.
Trowbridge, Serena, ed. My Ladys Soul. Brighton: Victorian Secrets, 2018.
Created 8 August 2024