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To the three young men who founded the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was the epitome of aesthetic womanhood. Her mournful beauty appears time and again in their luminescent portraits. In William Holman Hunt's 'Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus', she appears as a Sylvia. In John Everett Millais's 'Ophelia' she lies amidst the grassy water plants, 'her clothes spread wide and mermaid-like'. But it is with Gabriel Dante Rossetti that Siddal's name is forever entwined. It was Walter Deverall, honorary artist of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, who discovered Elisabeth Siddal. Pausing to browse the window of a hat shop near Piccadilly whilst shopping with his mother, Deverall noticed the striking looks of the milliner's assistant within. Introducing her to his fellow artists, Rossetti, Millais and Hunt, the tri-founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Elizabeth's sensual full lips, heavy lidded eyes and above all, her waist length auburn hair, soon placed her much in demand as their model. But the intense demands placed on her by the three artists nearly killed her. In 1852, while Millais composed and painted the famed portrait of 'Ophelia' in his converted greenhouse studio, she lay day after day in a bath of tepid water, heated merely by candles beneath, and she contracted pneumonia. None of the three young men found her more alluring than the poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The attraction proved mutual and she became his lover, then subsequently his fiancee, modelling henceforth for none apart from he. Having lived as man and wife for a number of years they eventually married in 1860 but their alliance was not a happy one. Siddal's continuing ill health, and Rossetti's predilection for sexual experimentation outside of their relationship, compounded the short-comings and within a short time their marriage had begun to flounder. After two years of increasing marital stress, Rossetti arrived home one day to discover his wife dying. Elizabeth had taken a draft of Laudanum, but had misjudged the strength of the tincture and fatally poisoned herself. As she lay in her open coffin in the sitting room of their house in Highgate village, the pallid complexion of death high-lighting her golden tresses, Rossetti placed a manuscript parchment of love poems against her cheek. Elizabeth took these words to her grave. Seven years later, Rossetti's artistic and literary reputation had begun to diminish, due in no small part to his increasing addiction to Whisky and chloral; an hypnotic sedative. Charles Augustus Howell, Rossetti's literary agent, in an attempt to bring his client back to public eye, suggested to Rossetti that the love poems which lay with his long dead wife demanded a wider audience and, as no copy existed, the originals should be retrieved from Elizabeth's grave. Though Rossetti initially resisted, Howell was persuasive and with an Exhumation Order signed, the Rossetti family tomb resounded to the sound of shovels once more. To ensure that no member of the public witnessed the scene the grave was opened after dark. A large adjacent bonfire lit the scene and, as the bell of nearby St Michael's church chimed midnight, Elizabeth's heavy metal coffin was hauled to the surface. Rossetti, unable to face the ghoulish deed had stayed at home but those who were present gasped as the last screw was removed from the lid and casket opened. Elizabeth looked as if in life, her features so perfectly preserved she seemed to have merely slumbered for the seven years since her interment. Her hair had changed though. The famed auburn locks which grace so many Pre-Raphaelite portraits had lost none of their vibrant colour but, waist length in life, her tresses had continued to grow after death and in the flickering light from the bonfire, looked to fill the coffin. Gingerly the manuscripts were taken from her and, whilst the casket was re-buried, they were disinfected and dried by a doctor and transported to Rossetti. He regretted his actions. Published shortly, the love poems were not the literary success expected and the whole episode haunted Rossetti for the remainder of his short life.
