Elizabeth Siddall is a strikingly familiar face to Pre-Raphaelite lovers. She is known to many as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s muse and the face of Millais’ doomed Ophelia. But she was more than that. Through her own artwork and poetry, we can look beyond her face and attempt to hear her voice. A new edition of her poetry has magnified that…
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Contemplating Hours: Pairing Burne-Jones and Siddal
In The Shape of My Heart, I shared that I like to blend seemingly unrelated works of art much like one would pair wine with food. Today’s concoction is Sir Edward Burne-Jones’ painting The Hours with a poem by Elizabeth Siddal. “I have been working very hard in spite of all things, and I hope to finish the ‘Wheel of…
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A #WombatFriday for Lizzie
Wednesday was Lizzie Siddal’s birthday and my sidekick Thaddeus Fern Diogenes Wombat (T-Dub to his friends), has decided to learn more about her. When learning about Lizzie, there’s a lot of misinformation to wade through, so I thought it best for T-Dub to read a personal account from someone who actually knew her. Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of artist Edward Burne-Jones,…
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Thank You, Lizzie Siddal
Today marks the birth of the woman who has had a deep and lasting influence on my life. Despite never actually meeting her, I know her face as well as my own. Through her art, poetry, and the Pre-Raphaelite works she appears in, Elizabeth Siddal has the power to captivate. The story of her life and struggles beckons to us…
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Lizzie Siddal Emerges from the Ghostly Mist
It would have been a perfect plot for a 1960s Hammer horror film: on the death of his wife, a poet places a treasured manuscript of his poems in her casket. Years later he has a new muse and love, a woman who had been a friend to them both. So he ghoulishly engineers his late wife’s exhumation so as…
