Lizzie Siddal: Face of the Pre-Raphaelites - Hardcover

Hawksley, Lucinda

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0802715508 ISBN 13: 9780802715500

Publisher: Walker Books, 2006

Synopsis

In the twenty-first century, even those who do not know Lizzie Siddal's name will recognize her face: she is Millais's doomed Ophelia and Rossetti's beatified Beatrice in two of the nineteenth century's most famous paintings. As Lucinda Hawksley explores in Lizzie Siddal, Face of the Pre-Raphaelites, Siddal's fame was a remarkable phenomenon: in a time when she was the opposite of the Victorian beauty (she was red-haired, quite tall, and painfully thin), she nonetheless scaled the social ranks to become the unlikely ideal.

A pivotal figure in London's artistic world of the mid-nineteenth century, Lizzie's short life ended in a delirium of opium. In this, the first full work devoted solely to Lizzie―her austere beginnings, quick rise to fame, and tragic end―Hawksley brings together the worlds of art and literature with style and verve. Lizzie Siddal was not merely the Pre-Raphaelites' obsession and muse, she was a talented poet and artist in her own right. Her tragic and haunting life story serves as a cautionary tale, offering many parallels to the modern-day world of art, fashion, beauty, and our obsession with what we hold to be the ideal.

About this title

About the Author

LUCINDA HAWKSLEY: An M.A. in Literature and the Visual Arts 1840-1940 and has written or co-written twelve books. She lives in England and is the great-great-great granddaughter of Charles Dickens.

Reviews

This book traces the life of Lizzie Siddal, who, from her humble beginnings as a shop girl, became a central figure of the Pre-Raphaelite movement by the time she died at 32 from a self-inflicted overdose of opiates. Today, readers are used to stories of small-town hopefuls using modeling as a springboard to wider artistic success (think Marilyn Monroe or Andie MacDowell), but Siddal, Hawksley claims, was the first. As a model and then an artist in her own right, this remarkable woman crossed paths with some of Victorian England's greatest artistic luminaries, appearing in masterworks by Walter Deverell, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and supported by Ford Madox Brown and John Ruskin. Hawksley recounts Siddal's life in exhilarating and painful detail, providing a glimpse of the internal and external forces that contributed to her self-destruction. Because direct evidence is scant-few of Siddal's letters or prose writings survive-scholars have inferred a great deal from the words of others and Siddal's own paintings. In doing so, Hawksley sometimes overreaches, coming across less like a biographer than a conjectural psycholoanalyst; on the whole, however, her work on this important figure is solid, lively and lucid. Scholars of the period will find the book of great interest, as will those wishing to learn more about women in the Victorian art world or about the Pre-Raphaelites in general.
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Tall, slender, red-haired, large-eyed, and regal, the striking young woman known as Lizzie Siddal was working in a London millinery shop when she attracted the fanatic attention of painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, one of the seven brash young artists who formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, declaring that art had "gone wrong" with the great painter Raphael. The romantic if morbid group is best remembered for Rossetti's many portraits of Lizzie, his magnificent obsession. But as Hawksley so crisply documents, for all his adoration, Rossetti was unfaithful and cruel, and Lizzie suffered chronic -anxiety-induced ailments and a wicked addiction to laudanum, dying at 32 in 1862. And still Rossetti's selfishness knew no bounds: he arranged for a ghoulish exhumation of her body to retrieve a poetry manuscript. Writing with authority, energy, and covert wit and indignation, Hawksley offers a fresh and affecting perspective on this still scandalous and tragic story. She relishes the strong personalities involved and their intriguing milieu and subtly guides readers to consider timeless questions pertaining to beauty and power, love and ambition. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Walker Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0802715508
• ISBN 13: 9780802715500
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230