Elizabeth Siddall

Well aware of her position in society and how she was portrayed by the (male) gazes of those who painted her, Siddall did not let this hold her back and in the nine years between her first drawing and her death, she produced no less than 100 artworks and poems.

Siddall took control of her work and creative agency in the narratives she was depicting, with much of her art challenging the hypocrisy of men who value women only for their beauty – work that is as relevant today as it was in the Victorian era it was created.

During her lifetime, she saw success as the only woman to be included in the first Pre-Raphaelite exhibition in 1857 and was hailed a “genius” by John Ruskin who offered her a stipend of £150 per year (equivalent to over £20,000 in 2025).

Her artworks, too, inspired Rossetti who frequently depicted the same subjects and literary tales shortly after, or at the same time, as she did, and he continued to draw inspiration from her work long after her death.

Despite this, Siddall’s life is more commonly remembered as being the favourite muse of the Pre-Raphaelites or the muse-turned-lover-turned-wife of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and her death is romanticised by Rossetti who, distraught by her death, chose to bury her with the only copy of his poems which he had dedicated to and written about her.

Like many romantic narratives of art history, this one, too, ignores the end of the tale where in, seven years after her death, Rossetti abandoned his melodramatic gesture of eternal love and secretly exhumed her body under the cover of darkness to retrieve the poems and have them published.