Deutsch £17.99 pp230
The Pre-Raphaelites, dreamy and poetical in their art, were quick off the mark when need be. Like young men today with an eye for the “fit” or “buff”, they had a knack for spotting what they called “Stunners”. Lizzie Siddal was one of these. She was found working in a hat shop near Leicester Square by the poet William Allingham. He raved about her to the painter Walter Deverell who needed a tall, thin model to pose as Viola in boy’s clothes for a scene from Twelfth Night. Deverell sent his mother (of course) to arrange matters. Before long, the young woman found herself posing, not just for Deverell but also for William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
For a milliner, working long hours for meagre pay, this was the stuff of fairy tales. Overnight, she had become principal muse to an exclusive gang of painters and poets. Her grave manner and unfashionably simple dress suited their aesthetic: while they sought to revive the earnestness and simplicity of the early Renaissance, she might have walked out of a Quattrocento fresco. Then Rossetti courted her, claimed her as his mistress and taught her how to draw and paint. He also insisted she pose for nobody else. Charles Allston Collins asked her to do so, but, according to Millais, she “answered in the most freezing manner, stating that she had other occupations”.
A similar hauteur had been displayed by her mother, when Mrs Deverell, on her son’s behalf, visited the Siddal home in the Old Kent Road. The house was faultlessly clean and Mrs Siddal, who had evidently come down in the world, came across as very correct and painfully refined. But Lizzie’s proud self-esteem also owed much to her new situation. Her experience would have mirrored that fondly recalled by another of the Pre-Raphaelites’ favourite models: “I never saw such men; it was being in a new world to be with them. I sat for them and was there with them and they were different to everyone else I ever saw. And I was a holy thing to them — I was a holy thing to them.” To be worshipped, turned into an icon and venerated for your beauty is, however, ultimately a ghastly fate. The savage violence, for instance, with which Marilyn Monroe, given sheets of contact prints for approval, scored out images of herself prefigured her suicide.
Advertisement
Lizzie Siddal, likewise obliged to carry an ideal, took her own life at the age of 29. Ill health, laudanum addiction, Rossetti’s infidelities and their long-delayed marriage played a part in her decline. But her tragedy owes as much to the impossible burden of blind adoration.
She died in 1862. And only now, a century or so later, are we given a full account of her life. In the earliest narratives concerning the Pre-Raphaelites she was defined entirely in relation to Rossetti, granted no status or meaning other than as his model and lover. Gradually, certain facts about her were uncovered, but uncertainty continued for years over the correct spelling of her name. (Born Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall, she dropped the final ‘l’ in her surname at Rossetti’s suggestion.) Details, as they emerged, about her life and identity became inextricably mixed with myth and legend, because the poignancy of her story and her troubled relationship with Rossetti invited gossipy inventions. One of the most breathtaking is the one that circulated after Rossetti arranged for her tomb to be exhumed, so he could reclaim the book of poems in manuscript that he had placed next to her cheek. The procedure took place at night, and, in order that the gravediggers could see what they were doing, a large fire was lit in the graveyard. When the coffin was re-opened, the firelight revealed a miraculously untainted corpse and a mass of coppery red hair that had continued to grow.
Lucinda Hawksley owes much to the groundwork done by previous scholars in this field, in particular Jan Marsh who has explored the ways in which each era has rewritten the myth of Lizzie Siddal.
Hawksley’s account translates this scholarship into a seductive biography. She introduces new facts and fresh arguments, but, not greatly smitten by Siddal’s own art, she does not incite fresh evaluation. And there are places where her book fights shy of the complexities that Marsh uncovered, where idiosyncracies are lost. But the story, as it gains in tragedy, is irresistible, and this retelling leaves the reader haunted afresh. It succeeds in bringing Lizzie Siddal centre stage, and to some extent removes the engima that puzzled others, even in her lifetime. William Rossetti, the brother of the painter, observed: “I hardly think I ever heard her say a single thing indicative of her own character, or of her serious underlying thought. All her talk was of a ‘chaffy’ kind — its tone sarcacstic, its substance lightsome. It was like the speech of a person who wanted to turn off the conversation . . .” Only Swinburne, towards the end of her life, broke through her depression and reserve, and elicited more of her interests and personality than any other of Rossetti’s friends or family.
Glimpses of this strange, mesmerisingly beautiful and unhappy woman illuminate this book. There is practicality and mordant wit in her letters to Rossetti, playful affection in a note to Georgiana Burne-Jones (“With a willow-pattern dish full of love to you and Ned”) and, in her poems, a devastating sense of failure. One, written at the age of 23, is titled Worn Out. Here she describes herself as “but a startled thing”, unable to love as she once did; a person with “a fading heart / And weary eyes of pain”. Yet she continued to be the subject of numerous drawings and paintings, which portrayed her, as Christina Rossetti saw, after a visit to her brother’s studio, “Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.”
Advertisement
Available at the Books First price of £14.39 plus £2.25 p&p on 0870 165 8585