LizzieSiddal.com Blog

William Michael Rossetti was not only the brother of Dante Gabriel and an original member  of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he was also their chronicler.  Read his contributions to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ here.   He was considered a “secretary of the PRB” and it is because of him that much is known about Elizabeth Siddal.  [...]

This episode of The Pre-Raphaelites documentary begins to discuss Lizzie as an artist around the 6:54 mark:

Millais was one of the first artists to portray Ophelia in the process of drowning. Couple this bold move with his Pre-Raphaelite dedication to “truth to nature” and you have a stunning, accurate painting. The video below ilustrates and explains how Millais painted Ophelia and Lizzie’s experience modeling:

It has been said that Lizzie developed a love of poetry at a young age, after discovering a Tennyson poem on a scrap of newspaper that had been used to wrap a pat of butter.  Unfortunately, we do not know which poem captured her attention.  But in honor of that moment, LizzieSiddal.com would like to [...]

I am thrilled and honored that Lucinda Hawksley, author of Lizzie Siddal: Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, took the time to answer a few questions. Hawksley is a best selling author, speaker, and the great-great-great- granddaughter of Charles Dickens. If you have not yet read her biography of Elizabeth Siddal, I encourage you to do [...]

I wanted to share with you a recent comment to the post What do you think of Lizzie’s Inquest? The Pre Raphaelites were young people in revolt against old ideas of art and the dehumanizing all pervasive influence of an industrial society on the make. In those days a long life was a luxury so [...]

Alice Jardine’s influential book Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity describes Jardine’s theory of the process through which a woman is created “ by patriarchy, by history or by the culture she inhabits. Rather than focusing on representations of women in literature or literature written by women, she states in the introduction to her book that she is concerned about the process of (reading and writing) woman (Jardine 19). In other words, she examines the transformation of the feminine from subject into verb, an operation that renders her liminal and ephemeral and puts her and her obligatory, that is, historical connotations to use as intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing and speaking (Jardine 25). Gynesis is the term Jardine coins to describe this undertaking.
By definition, such a scheme must have the effect of stripping women of their own agency. As results of a process, they cannot be subjects, only objects, and as such they cannot create but can only facilitate creation. If a woman does attempt to create, as Nancy K. Miller states in “Arachnologies: The Woman, the Text and the Critic, patriarchy will view her product as separate from her and will deny her authority over her own production.