Lizzie’s Discovery in William Gaunt’s Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy

Posted on 10 October 2008

I find it interesting to see the similarities and differences in the ways authors choose to describe Lizzie’s discovery. Jane Marsh makes a point, an important point, that when Lizzie was discovered it was not for her beauty. Lucinda Hawksley describes in a wealth of detail how Mrs. Deverell visited Lizzie’s mother in the Siddal family home to request that Lizzie model for Twelfth Night. Below, from William Gaunt’s The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy Gaunt shares in pretty prose how Siddal became, as he describes, the Pre-Raphaelite “Dream-Woman”:

Note: Gaunt was mistakenly describes Lizzie’s age at the time of her discovery as eighteen.
The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy by William Gaunt
Published in 1942

THE DREAM-WOMAN APPEARS
A woman came on the scene in 1850 who was profoundly to affect the fate of Gabriel Rossetti. A beautiful young woman, – a girl of eighteen. Her name was Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal.

She was discovered, quite inevitably, by the group in its search for models. Young men in their twenties could not eternally paint the adaptable Mr. Millais senior, the admirable Polidori. In all logic a movement of dreams must have its dream-woman. If Miss Siddal had not existed it would have been necessary to invent her.

She worked in a milliner’s shop in a picturesque court of such shops called Cranbourne Alley. Young men would pause before their windows, smitten by the casual glance of a pair of sparkling eyes, the turn of a shapely arm, tantalizingly perceived through the glass, among the bonnets and gowns. Stolling thuswise, in appraisal, William Allingham saw her first.

Allingham, excise officer in Donegal, loved London. Eagerly he came from Ballyshannon, to read his Irish poems about fairies to his Pre-Raphaelite friends, to explore the endless, romantic streets.

He told Walter Deverell about her – lively ill-fated Deverell, so handsome with his straight nose and silky moustache that ladies passing by, used hurriedly to go round side streets in order to catch a second glimpse of him. Deverell wanted a model for Viola in a picture of Twelfth Night. He went, with his mother, to Cranbourne Alley. Mrs. Deverell approved the young woman in the shop as respectable and Walter came raving to the group of the ‘stunner’ he had found.

For a brief while the group assimilated her with the same indifferent enthusiasm as if she had been a sister, an aunt or the wife of a half-brother. She sat for them all. She was the red-haired Celt in Hunt’s Christians sheltering from the Persecution of the Druids. She was Viola disguised as a page in Deverell’s Twelfth Night (in which Rossetti posed for the Jester). She was Ophelia for Millais, lying, ‘her clothes spread wide and mermaid-like’ in the bath at Gower Street, so that the artist could depict the very nicety of drowning.

Then Rossetti claimed her for his own.