Gabriel Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal

Gabriel was one of the 4 children of Gabriele and Frances Rossetti… who were a remarkable family of Italians living in London.  All four children were highly intelligent and talented.  Christina was a poet; Gabriel a poet and member of the Pre Raphaelite group of painters and William supported the family by doing a civil service job, but also wrote. 

Maria was the most religious and conservative minded of the family, but was very intelligent.  She found her vocation in later life, as a member of an Anglican sisterhood.

Gabriel, born in a shabby street  in London in 1828, was rebellious and wilful, though talented.  His love life was also erratic, and he was often very selfish in his relationships with women.

For several years, he was engaged to Elizabeth Siddal, a girl from a poor background who acted as an artist’s model -but who also wanted to write or be an artist herself. Lizzie had some talent and worked at her painting but she was not as gifted as her fiancé and she had frequent health problems which made her life difficult.  She was painted by Millais as Ophelia and caught a chill from being immersed in cold water.

Gabriel painted her on many occasions; he was obsessed with her off key beauty.  However, he delayed marrying her, and took up with other less respectable women, at times when Lizzie was away from him. It has never been very clear what her health problems were.   Some thought it was TB, which was a frequent illness among Victorians and one for which there was no real cure.

She was often away seeking a cure for her health difficulties.  But like some other Victorian invalids, she made her health worse by the use of laudanum.  She was in short an addict.  The drug was easily available and not recognised as dangerous… 

When she and Gabriel finally married, she became pregnant, but continued as other Victorian women often did, to take laudanum.  She gave birth to a still born daughter and became very depressed, taking even more laudanum. One evening in 1862,  Gabriel came home to find her dead, it may have been suicide or an accidental overdose. He was devastated.  He couldn’t believe she was dead and then blamed himself for neglecting her.  So as a romantic gesture, he placed the poems he had been working on, in her coffin with her.