by Stephanie Chatfield
Framing Elizabeth Siddal invites us to look beyond the familiar myths and images that have defined her for more than a century. By examining the metaphorical frames that shaped her legacy, we begin to understand the woman behind the icon.
When you begin to delve into the life of Elizabeth Siddal, it doesn’t take long to encounter poet William Allingham’s haunting diary entry:
“Short, sad, and strange her life; it must have seemed to her like a troubled dream.”
It’s a line that reads like an epitaph, evoking an image of Siddal as a fragile, ethereal figure drifting through a melancholic haze, an Ophelia in a laudanum fog. Allingham’s words seem colored by hindsight and tragedy.
The mythologizing of Elizabeth Siddal began early and has deepened with time. Many of us first discover her through the infamous tale of her exhumation. It’s a grotesque detail that simultaneously horrifies and fascinates. Stories like this, combined with her melancholy poetry and early death, have contributed to her legacy as a spectral muse more than as a living, breathing artist.
Take, for instance, the account of Siddal posing as Ophelia for John Everett Millais. Wearing an antique gown, she lay in a bathtub filled with water so that Millais could faithfully capture the floating fabric and her flowing hair. Lizzie, too timid or too committed to interrupt the session, remained silent when the oil lamps warming the tub went out. She caught pneumonia, and her father, incensed, threatened to sue.
The earliest published account of this came from Arthur Hughes in The Life and Letters of Sir John Everett Millais, released after Millais’ death. It’s one of many examples of how we reconstruct her life in hindsight; more legend than lived experience.
Much of the focus on Siddal isn’t really about her at all. We see her life story through a filter of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s grief and eventual breakdown. Placing a book of his poetry in her coffin, only to have her exhumed years later to retrieve it. Or how her golden hair had continued to grow in death, a macabre flourish that reinforces her otherworldly reputation.
In death, she became a Victorian myth, part Ophelia, part Blessed Damozel, eclipsed by tragedy and myth rather than remembered for her artistic ambition or individuality.
Even those who knew her tended to write about her in ways that reinforced this romanticized image. William Michael Rossetti, her brother-in-law, largely focused on her in relation to his brother and overlooked evidence of her independence, such as her time at an art school in Sheffield. Others, like biographer Joseph Knight and writer Theodore Watts-Dunton, framed her as little more than a shadow in Rossetti’s story… a muse who vanished, leaving behind only the echo of her influence on him.
Watts-Dunton went so far as to liken Rossetti to Shakespeare’s Prospero, saying that with Lizzie’s death, he “buried his wand.” It’s a poetic metaphor, but one that centers Rossetti’s suffering, not Siddal’s humanity.
To be clear, this is not to place the blame for Siddal’s mythologization solely on the men who knew her. It is incredibly difficult not to romanticize her. The bathtub anecdotes, the coffin of flowing hair… they’re irresistible. They’re also inescapable.
But what remains striking is how little we hear from Siddal herself. Few of her letters survive. Without Rossetti, we might not know her at all. But because of him, we often know her only through him.
It’s tempting to mine her poetry for autobiography; to read the sorrowful lines as reflections of her inner world. But is that fair? Many Victorian poets wrote of melancholy without being mistaken for their verses. Yet with Siddal, we search her lines for answers, for glimpses of a woman whose true voice has been obscured by decades of lore.
Among all the voices that have written about her, one stands apart. Georgiana Burne-Jones. In The Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, Georgiana wrote of Siddal not as a muse or a symbol, but as a friend. Her account is warm and personal, and it offers a rare, precious window into the real woman behind the myth.
Where others cast Siddal in the role of tragic figure, Georgiana simply remembered her. And perhaps that, more than anything else, brings us closest to the Elizabeth Siddal who once lived, not the Ophelia or the Damozel, but the artist, the friend, the woman.
While she certainly mentions Elizabeth Siddal’s ill health and melancholia, she also shares happy memories such as this account of Siddal and their friend Algernon Charles Swinburne.
“Dear Lizzie Rossetti laughed to find that she and Swinburne had such locks of the same coloured hair, and one night when we went in our thousands to see “Colleen Bawn”, she declared that as she sat at one end of the row we filled and he at another, a boy who was selling books of the play looked at Swinburne and took fright, and then, when he came round to where she was, started again with terror, muttering to himself “There’s another of ’em!”
Mrs. Burne-Jones also shares a treasured note received from Siddal:
“I never had but one note from Lizzie, and I kept it for love of her even then. Let it stand here in its whole short length as a memento of the Blackfriars evenings, and in the hope that some one beside myself may feel the pathos of its tender playfulness:
“My Dear Little Georgie,
I hope you intend coming over with Ned tomorrow evening like a sweetmeat, it seems so long since I saw you dear. Janey will be here I hope to meet you.
“With a willow-pattern dish full of love to you and Ned,
“Lizzie”
In these accounts, a different Elizabeth Siddal emerges, one not solely defined by illness or sorrow, but by glimpses of warmth, humor, and vitality.
Perhaps we can view these letters as a gentle counterbalance to the prevailing image of Siddal as a tragic, laudanum-laden figure. They serve as a reminder that the narrative of her life need not be dominated by despair.
Let’s allow space for the lighter stories, however few, to take root alongside the more somber ones. For every tale of heartbreak, there were likely countless quiet joys, moments of laughter, affection, and ordinary contentment, that history simply didn’t preserve.
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