Elizabeth Siddal

Siddal was perhaps the most important model to sit for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and their ideas about feminine beauty were profoundly influenced by her. She was Rossetti's model par excellence; almost all of his paintings are in some sense her portraits. She was also painted by Walter Deverell[?], William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, and was the model for Millais' well known The Lady of Shalott[?].

In 1854 Siddal began to study with Rossetti, and in 1855 John Ruskin began to subsidize her career as a patron. Never in the best of health, and probably suffering from tuberculosis, Siddal travelled to Paris and Nice for several years, returning to England in 1860 to marry Rossetti.

In 1861, Siddal became pregnant; her pregnancy ended in miscarriage. Suffering from melancholia, Siddal committed suicide by an overdose of laudanum in 1862.

Death, however, was not her last adventure. Overcome with grief, Rossetti enclosed a manuscript containing the only copy he had of many poems he had written in her coffin. In 1869, Rossetti, his own career declining because of his own excesses in drugs and alcohol, repented of his action and wanted his poems back. Rossetti procured an order to have her coffin exhumed to retrieve his manuscript. This was done in the dead of night so as to avoid public curiosity and attention. Her corpse was reportedly remarkably preserved and her delicate beauty intact when the manuscript was retrieved. Rossetti published the poems; they were not well received by the critics, and he remained haunted by the incident through the rest of his own brief life.

Quotation:

Oh grieve not with thy bitter tears

The life that passes fast;

The gates of heaven will open wide

And take me in at last.

Then sit down meekly at my side

And watch my young life flee;

Then solemn peace of holy death

Come quickly unto thee.

But true love, seek me in the throng

Of spirits floating past,

And I will take thee by the hands

And know thee mine at last.

-- From Early Death