Catherine Peters
Guggum The Beautiful
Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel
By Lucinda Hawkley
André Deutsch 230pp £17.99 order from our bookshop
In a competition to find the most inappropriate nickname ever bestowed, 'Guggum', Dante Gabriel Rossetti's vet name for Elizabeth Siddal, might take the prize. The intense, often moribund Pre-Raphaelite portraits of her suggest tragedy; and it is as a tragic figure that she has most often been seen. She is best known as the model for Millais's dead Ophelia, shown on the cover of Lucinda Hawksley's new book. Stoically uncomplaining as the bath water grew chilly and Millais painted on, Lizzie was quite wrongly rumoured to have died of consumption as a result. Many of Rossetti's most famous paintings of her - in particular Beata Beatrix, showing Dante's Beatrice at the moment of death - are similarly doom-laden. The most macabre episode of her short, sad story happened posthumously, when Rossetti, having impetuously buried the only copy of his poems in her coffin, decided that he would after all rather like to publish them and was persuaded to dig them up.
Modelling was not a respectable profession in the 1850s, but Lizzie Siddal was neither a guttersnipe nor a loose-living demi-mondaine. She came from a decent lower-middle-class family, and was earning her living as a milliner when she was discovered by the painter Walter Deverell, who introduced her to the Pre-Raphaelite
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Surveillance, facial recognition and control: my review of @jonfasman's "We See It All" https://literaryreview.co.uk/watching-the-watchers via @Lit_Review
I reviewed Diary of a Film by Niven Govinden for @Lit_Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-directors-cut
'Retired judges have usually had long careers on the bench, during which they have acquired an ingrained reticence when it comes to speaking on controversial topics. Not so Sumption.'
Dominic Grieve reviews Jonathan Sumption's 'Law in a Time of Crisis'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-case-for-the-citizen