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The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context by Anne Woolley (review)

2023; Indiana University Press; Volume: 65; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/vic.00074

1527-2052

Margaret Reynolds,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

Reviewed by: The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context by Anne Woolley Margaret Reynolds (bio) The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context, by Anne Woolley; pp. x + 284. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021, $130.00, £85.00. In spite of the fact that her face appears in many well-known pictures, Elizabeth Siddal remains enigmatic. Her earliest incarnation was as the cross-dressed Viola in Walter Deverell's Twelfth Night (1850), but most people know her from John Millais's drowning Ophelia (1852). Death stories abound around Siddal: how she contracted pneumonia modeling in a cooling bath; how anorexia and a laudanum addiction stole her strength; how her body was exhumed after Dante Gabriel Rossetti regretted his remorseful graveside gesture when he placed some manuscript poems in her coffin. [End Page 700] In The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context, Anne Woolley begins at the end with the story of Siddal's sad demise in February 1862. But she moves from the familiar life story to the work, arguing that Siddal's poetry sits within its specific context, engaging with the contemporary debates that absorbed the writers and artists who influenced and plundered her short life. The task is a challenging one. Siddal's is a fugitive poetry. Like Emily Dickinson, she seems to have written for herself. She did not speak of her work, even to close friends, and published nothing in her lifetime. The manuscripts in the Ashmolean Museum are fragmentary and haphazard, scraps of paper, creased and torn, for Siddal seems not to have possessed any notebooks. But she clearly worked at these poems, tightening her meter, polishing phrases in revision. To be sure, there are only fifteen extant poems, plus some fragments, all recorded in Serena Trowbridge's My Ladys Soul: The Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddall (2018). But these are distinctive poems, adrift in a stylized world of heightened suffering, asking questions about the self, about love and betrayal, about sex relations, about responsibility and power. The text Woolley uses is Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal (1978) edited by Roger C. Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner. A handful of Siddal's poems were published by William Michael Rossetti at the turn of the nineteenth century, but he altered the text, tidied punctuation, invented titles, and made himself their apologist, regretting Siddal's "limited but refined artistic faculty" (Dante Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer [Cassell & Company, 1889], 22). This literary history, along with a longstanding emphasis on biography and the persuasion of the images, makes Siddal's poetry a difficult topic. And there is one final problem that Woolley faces head on: that to work on private poems, about secret subjects, never intended to be read by others, "presents those wishing to place her poems in the public domain with an ethical dilemma" (82). This is why Woolley's enterprise in focusing on the cultural "context" for these poems is appropriate. As long ago as 1997, Constance W. Hassett proposed the same task: "My thesis is that Siddal was prompted to write—as all writers are—by other writings" ("Elizabeth Siddal's Poetry: A Problem and Some Suggestions," Victorian Poetry, vol. 35, no. 4 [1997], 446). Reading Siddal's work through this frame rescues her from William Michael Rossetti's conception of her "wail of pang and pathos" (Some Reminiscences of William Michael Rossetti, vol. 1 [Charles Scribner's Sons, 1906], 196). This endeavor is supported by the facts regarding Siddal's works. Over and again her sources for inspiration were the writings of others: Robert Browning, John Keats, Walter Scott, Alfred Tennyson. Woolley uses Siddal's pictures as a way into her discussions, beginning with a chapter on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's sonnet sequence The House of Life (1881) followed by a comparative reading with a selection of Siddal's poems, which focus on the contrast between earthly and divine love, most notably in the poems usually called "A Silent Wood" (1857), "Lord May I Come?" (1862), and "The Lust of the Eyes." In this last work Siddal's poetic "sarcasm," noted by Christina Rossetti, is brought sharply into focus (qtd. in Rossetti Papers: 1862 to 1870, edited by William Michael Rossetti [Charles...