by Stephanie Chatfield
The image of Ophelia, floating serenely in a river with her hair fanned out and flowers drifting around her, has become one of the most iconic representations of tragic femininity in Western art. But beneath the surface of this romanticized image lies a more unsettling truth—one that blurs the boundaries between art and life, performance and reality.
In the case of Elizabeth Siddal, the 19th-century artist and muse, the convergence of her life with the character of Ophelia is both powerful and problematic. Through her, we are forced to confront how women have historically been silenced, aestheticized, and consumed by tragedy—not only in literature and art, but in life itself.
Ophelia’s allure lies in her contradictions. She’s not merely a symbol of passive innocence but a figure filled with complexity: soft yet sharp, passive yet powerful, alive and yet profoundly marked by death. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet she’s a mirror, reflecting cultural anxieties and ideals around femininity, madness, and beauty. These tensions made her a favorite subject for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, whose fascination with medievalism, idealized womanhood, and emotional depth found fertile ground in Ophelia’s watery grave.
One of the most haunting manifestations of this artistic obsession was John Everett Millais’ famous painting Ophelia, for which Elizabeth Siddal posed.
In the pursuit of realism, she lay in a bathtub filled with cold water for hours, holding the pose as Millais captured every detail of her imagined drowning. On one occasion, the lamps heating the water went out, and Siddal became severely ill as a result. Millais, engrossed in his work, continued painting. This incident encapsulates the disturbing dynamic at play: the artist’s devotion to beauty often overlooks the suffering of the subject. In Siddal’s case, the role of Ophelia was not just one she portrayed—it became a prophetic echo of her life.
Siddal’s real-life tragedy unfolded in tandem with her relationship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter who loved and idealized her. Their long, turbulent romance mirrors the dysfunctional relationship between Ophelia and Hamlet. Rossetti painted Siddal obsessively, often portraying her as fragile and ethereal—qualities the Victorians found desirable in women. But this idealization masked a deeper reality: Siddal suffered from chronic illness, emotional turmoil, and an increasing dependence on laudanum. The woman who seemed to embody poetic fragility was in fact engaged in a daily struggle for agency and health.
Siddal was more than a muse. She was a poet and painter in her own right, producing works that explored despair, loneliness, and femininity with stark emotional clarity. Yet her contributions have long been overshadowed by the larger body of work by her male contemporaries.
After she died from a laudanum overdose in 1862, Rossetti, wracked with guilt, buried his unpublished poems with her. Years later, in a bizarre and gothic turn of events, he had her grave exhumed to retrieve them—a macabre postscript that reads like something straight from a Shakespearean tragedy.
The merging of Siddal and Ophelia is both literal and symbolic. Siddal physically enacted Ophelia’s death in Millais’ painting, but she also lived out many of the same emotional contours: heartbreak, artistic suppression, and a descent into despair.
However, unlike Ophelia—whose voice is extinguished in the river—Siddal’s has begun to rise again. Contemporary scholars and artists have reexamined her work not just as an echo of others’ imaginations, but as an expression of her own inner life.
She is no longer seen solely as the muse or tragic heroine, but as a woman who forged meaning and beauty from her grief.
While Ophelia remains suspended in the watery currents of romanticized tragedy, Siddal is finally being recognized as an artist whose voice, long silenced, now breaks the surface.
Index of Ophelia Pages
- “Miss Siddal had a trying experience”
- Anne Thackeray Ritchie on Millais’ Ophelia
- Artist Arthur Hughes on Millais’ Ophelia
- Flowers in Ophelia: Millais’ Letter to Mrs. Combe
- Millais: The Beginning of Ophelia
- Some Notes on Millais As a Painter of Landscape
- The Legacy of Millais’ Ophelia
More about Elizabeth Siddal