Description of Lizzie from Georgiana Burne-Jones

Posted on 23 March 2007

Description of Elizabeth Siddal
(Kindly contributed to this site by Gary Attlesey)

Georgiana Burne-Jones’ description of Lizzie
Published in Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones by Georgiana Burne-Jones (London, Macmillan & Co. Limited 1904).

Lizzie’s slender, elegant figure tall for those days, but I never knew her actual height comes back to me, in a graceful and simple dress, the incarnate opposite of the “tailor-made” young lady. We went home with them to their rooms at Hampstead, and I know that I then received an impression which never wore away, of romance and tragedy between her and her husband. I see her in the little upstairs bedroom with its lattice window, to which she carried me when we arrived, and the mass of her beautiful deep-red hair as she took off her bonnet: she wore her hair very loosely fastened up, so that it fell in soft, heavy wings. Her complexion looked as if a rose tint lay beneath the white skin, producing a most soft and delicate pink for the darkest flesh-tone. Her eyes were of a kind of golden brown ( agate colour is the only word I can think of to describe them ) and wonderfully luminous: in all Gabriel’s drawings of her and in the type she created in his mind this is to be seen. The eyelids were deep, but without any languor or drowsiness, and had the peculiarity of seeming scarcely to veil the light in her eyes when she was looking down.
Whilst we were in her room she showed me a design she had made, called the “Woeful Victory” then the vision passes.

LizzieSiddal.com recommends the following book:
A Circle of Sisters: Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne Jones, Agnes Poynter, and Louisa Baldwin