The Grey Lady (1883) is an interesting work by Millais in which we see the ghost of a murdered woman. The staircase was taken from St. Mary’s Tower, Birnam, a building that has since been demolished but you can see photographs of it here taken in 1963. The artist’s son described the work in The Life and Letters of Sir…
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Victorian Murder
In 1857, a twenty-two-year-old woman stood trial in Glasgow for murdering her former lover. It was the cause célèbre of the day and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti declared her too beautiful to be executed whether she was guilty or not, saying, “you wouldn’t hang a stunner!” (‘Letters of DG Rossetti’, Atlantic Monthly vol. 77) Rossetti used the term ‘stunner’ quite…
