“The Unclosed Coffin”: The Neo-Victorian Afterlives of Elizabeth Siddal

In the prologue to Episode 1 of the BBC’s neo-Victorian drama, Desperate Romantics (2009), a comedy charting the lives and loves of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the fictional narrator reflects that, “an artist is nothing at all without a subject, a model, a muse.” Of all the women associated with the revolutionary painters, it is Elizabeth Siddal who has been persistently represented in popular culture as the Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel, as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s muse and as tragic victim. Despite recent scholarship which makes a convincing case for recovering Siddal as both an artist and a poet in her own right, her incarnation in neo-Victorian texts remains problematic, and continues to deny her agency. Focusing on the representation of the Pre-Raphaelites and their muses in neo-Victorianism, this chapter explores questions about the ethics of appropriation and gendered mythologising in neo-Victorian biofiction and adaptation. Through the specific case study of Desperate Romantics (2009), the chapter discusses how “Lizzie” is represented in ways which perpetuate traditional passive feminine tropes. It also considers the representation of other female characters in the series, primarily Annie Miller and Effie Gray. The mythologising of Siddal and her female peers arguably contributes to the habitual tendency to reduce female artistic production to their biography, remembered for what their looks and loves, while male artists are celebrated for their creative outputs.