Nor noble as they count the line:
Only as graceful as a bough,
And tendrils of the vine:
Only as noble as sweet Eve
Your ancestress and mine.
And downcast were her dovelike eyes
And downcast was her tender cheek
Her pulses fluttered like a dove
To hear him speak.
Lizzie and Rossetti had been recognized by their friends as a couple for two years, but there was no sign of an engagement ring, neither was there any indication that his mother or Maria were aware of the true nature of their relationship. Lizzie hoped that her meeting with Dante’s sister would be the start of the formalities of a betrothal, but it was not to be. Despite Rossetti’s obvious adoration of her, he was not willing to make any formal declaration to the world. It was humiliating and also frightening – what would she do if he decided he preferred someone else and abandoned her? She had given up her career and her reputation for him. Whether intentionally or not, he had encouraged her to become entirely dependent on him without offering any genuine security in return. She had placed herself in a frighteningly precarious position.
The following is believed to be one of Lizzie’s earliest poems, written c.1854; its alternative title is “Sleepless”:
Fragment of a Ballad
Many a mile over land and sea
Unsummoned my love returned to me;
I remember not the words he said
But only the trees moaning overhead.
And he came ready to take and bear
The cross I had carried for many a year,
But words came slowly one by one
From frozen lips shut still and dumb.
How sounded my words so still and slow
To the great strong heart that loved me so,
Who came to save me from pain and wrong
And to comfort me with his love so strong?
I felt the wind strike chill and cold
And vapours rise from the red-brown mould;
I felt the spell that held my breath
Bending me down to a living death.
The ballad emphasizes Lizzie’s impossible situation: her belief that Rossetti loves her, but also the wounding knowledge that although he wants to “comfort” her, he is unable to do the one thing that will make her security – and therefore her happiness – complete. By this time Lizzie was no longer the adored, unique supermodel – she was rapidly becoming merely a mistress, a status reluctantly forced upon her and one that felt like “a living death”.
CHAPTER SIX
“Why does he not marry her?”
On March 10, 1855, an entry in Ford Madox Brown’s diary reads, “She is a stunner and no mistake. Rossetti once told me that, when he first saw her, he felt his destiny was defined. Why does he not marry her?” It is a question that Lizzie must have asked herself hundreds of times and one that continues to be posed by countless biographers and scholars. Dante Rossetti’s and Lizzie Siddal’s relationship has inspired conversational debate ever since 1850 and still excites discussion today. Despite William Rossetti’s claim in his memoirs that they had become engaged around 1851, there was no formal announcement and, indeed, at that date the Rossetti family were almost all in ignorance of Lizzie’s existence. The latter was with good reason – Gabriele would never have approved of his son marrying an artist’s model, or a lower-class girl whose parents lived in an insalubrious area of Southwark. Neither was William Rossetti ever a fan of “The Sid”, though whether he disliked her for a specific reason or was simply jealous of the way she usurped his brother’s affection is uncertain. William idolized his older, often ungrateful brother and Lizzie’s sudden hold over him was galling – not least because she ended up holding court in Chatham Place, a home provided by William for himself and Dante. Most contemporary accounts of Lizzie were either written by, or at least edited by, William, so it is almost impossible to receive an objective view. After her death, William described Lizzie in the following terms: “Her character was somewhat singular – not quite easy to understand, and not at all on the surface … I hardly think I ever heard her say a single thing indicative of her own character, or of her serious underlying thought. All her talk was of a ‘chaffy’ kind – its tone sarcastic, its substance lightsome. It was like the speech of a person who wanted to turn off the conversation …”
Rossetti would not have been the first of his acquaintance to make a match of which society would not approve. Emma Madox Brown had been one of her husband’s models, and had far less education and social ability than Lizzie, and Holman Hunt was getting ready to marry one of his models – a woman of far lower social standing than Lizzie. Even the wealthy and deeply respectable John Everett Millais had not managed to make a suitable match without causing a scandal. Rossetti cannot have been so worried about his reputation that his fears of marrying someone of a lower social class would have put him off spending his life with the woman with whom he was in love. After all, he believed he was above needing to worry about the bourgeois conventions of reputation and was perfectly happy in later life to have his friends and acquaintances meet the irrepressible Fanny Cornforth – a good-natured but coarse and very obviously working-class woman, without the benefit of Lizzie’s graces.
If Rossetti was so concerned with his reputation, why did he flaunt his affair with Annie Miller? Especially as the affair was conducted largely during Holman Hunt’s sojourn abroad, thereby earning Rossetti a scandalous reputation both because of Annie’s dubious sexual history and because he was betraying a friend. Reputation, therefore, cannot have been the overriding factor in his hesitation.
There has been much speculation about whether Lizzie and Rossetti consummated their relationship before marriage – surprisingly, the general consensus appears to be that they did not. Many biographers and academics claim that Lizzie refused Rossetti – some even describe her as frigid (surely an extremely odd term to use in reference to a Victorian woman who declined to have sex with a man she was not even engaged to). Some claim that it was Rossetti himself who refused to move their relationship onto a sexual level, citing a conversation he had with friends in which he denounced the concept of free love. However, it must be remembered that this conversation was itself in stark contrast to an earlier comment Rossetti had made when he shocked a young Holman Hunt by complacently commenting that women were “so much nicer when they have lost their virtue”. (It seems, though, that Rossetti was most probably still a virgin himself at the time he made this provocative comment, aged about 20.) If Rossetti was so against sex outside marriage, why did he sleep with Annie Miller and Fanny Cornforth? His fervent admiration for Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a medieval exponent of the wonders of sex before marriage, is another factor in believing he was perfectly at ease with his sexual needs and willing to satisfy them without worrying about the conventions of society.
It has been claimed that it was Lizzie’s refusal to have sex with Rossetti that pushed him into the arms of Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth and the other women he had affairs with during his relationship with Lizzie, but these affairs began while Lizzie was abroad, when they were fighting or when they had become estranged from one another. I dispute that Lizzie continued to refuse him and believe they did have a sexual relationship before marriage. My main reason for this is that I cannot see any other reason for him not marrying her. If she had refused to have sex with him without being married, he would, at the height of his feelings for her, have married her in order to sleep with her, as so many Victorian men did. He was in awe of his father, with whom he occasionally argued about his unconventional behaviour and his inability to earn a proper income, but after the death of Gabriele, in 1854, Dante was the head of the family, able to do as he pleased – and around the time of Gabriele’s death Dante’s and Lizzie’s relationship was at its height, with his feelings for her apparent to all who saw them together. By the time Rossetti’s year of mourning for his father was a
t an end, Lizzie was receiving a generous annuity from Ruskin and, as Jan Marsh suggests, if Rossetti had married her then, she would have been expected to give up Ruskin’s allowance because a married woman could not accept payments from a man who was not her husband. Rossetti’s precarious finances meant he could not afford to allow Lizzie to give up such a generous amount of money, which may add another dimension to his reluctance to marry her at that time.
Another strong indication that their relationship was sexual is the fact that they stayed together in Rossetti’s rooms on many occasions. In an age when it was considered intimate for a man to talk to an unmarried woman without the presence of a chaperone, spending the night alone in the same apartment was unheard of and absolutely taboo, even if they slept in separate rooms. There was no sense in Lizzie taking such an enormous risk – with her family’s home a comparatively short distance away – if she did not have an overwhelming reason for wanting to be alone with Rossetti.
Lizzie’s poems provide another hint at a sexual side to their relationship. The final line of “Sleepless” talks about a relationship bringing the heroine to “a living death”. This pays reference to Lizzie’s own sense of loss caused by Rossetti’s lack of a proposal, though it may have a double meaning. The term “little death” is a poetic device for referring to an orgasm. Lizzie’s poem could, therefore, also refer to her sexual relationship with Rossetti. Many of the poem’s lines are sexually suggestive: “the trees moaning overhead”; “he came ready to take and bear / The cross I had carried for many a year” and the “great strong heart” of her lover relieving her “frozen lips” and offering “comfort”. This is not the poetry of a repressed virgin who continually kept her lover at arm’s length while teasingly staying the night in his one-bedroomed apartment. It is also worth remembering that Lizzie’s closest friend was Emma Madox Brown, who had an overtly sexual relationship with Ford Madox Brown for several years before marriage, a circumstance that could not be ignored after the birth of their daughter two and a half years before their wedding day.
Lizzie was brought up by very religious parents who attended a Congregational church and were well known in the Christian community both in Southwark and in Sheffield. There have been suggestions, however, that she was not particularly devout herself – until she met the Pusey family in Oxford in 1855. If this was the case, and Lizzie suddenly decided in 1855 that she was doing wrong by sleeping with Rossetti and wanted to stop, it could well explain his sudden rush of infidelities at around this time and the many arguments that began to colour their relationship from the mid-1850s onwards.
Lizzie poem “The Lust of the Eyes” contains more than a subtle suggestion that their relationship was sexual. The date on which it was written is unknown but the bitterness of the subject matter makes it unlikely to have been composed after their wedding:
The Lust of the Eyes
I care not for my Lady’s soul
Though I worship before her smile;
I care not where be my Lady’s goal
When her beauty shall lose its wile.
Low sit I down at my Lady’s feet
Gazing through her wild eyes
Smiling to think how my love will fleet
When their starlike beauty dies.
I care not if my Lady pray
To our Father which is in Heaven
But for joy my heart’s quick pulses play
For to me her love is given.
Then who shall close my Lady’s eyes
And who shall fold her hands?
Will any hearken if she cries
Up to the unknown lands?
This poem illustrates Lizzie’s own realization that she has been duped; that the lover she trusted so entirely and fully expected to marry was in fact content to keep her solely as his mistress. Lizzie’s religious background makes it unlikely that she would have taken a succession of lovers, like Annie Miller, but she was in love with Rossetti and believed from the beginning of their relationship that they would be married – as soon as he had earned enough money to support her. Lizzie’s sister Lydia, to whom she was very close, became pregnant before her wedding. It seems likely that the sisters would have shared similar views on sex before marriage – believing that it was acceptable as long as there was the proviso that there would soon be a wedding. This attitude would also explain Lizzie’s martyr-like devotion to Rossetti and her refusal to leave, even when he treated her badly. She knew she could not leave him because she would no longer be acceptable to other men.
The fact that Lizzie did not become pregnant before marriage is not proof that no sexual relationship was in existence. Lizzie’s addiction may well have prevented conception. There is also the possibility that, as a result of becoming painfully thin at regular intervals, her periods may have ceased for long stretches of time, as can happen to anorexics. There was also fairly effective contraception available in the mid-nineteenth century. Condoms, or “sheaths”, were easily available for men to buy, although they must have been extremely unpleasant to use, made as they were of animal intestines, usually sheep gut.36 Women could use a specially treated sponge, a pessary or a “rubber pad” (which was similar to the modern contraceptive cap). They were also advised to douche or syringe themselves immediately after sex, using an astringent solution made with a substance such as vinegar or lemon juice, in an attempt to prevent conception. None of these methods was foolproof, but they were more effective than leaving it to chance.
That Lizzie had a sexual relationship with Rossetti which she later regretted is implicit in her poem “Worn Out”, written around 1856:
Worn Out
Thy strong arms are around me, love
My head is on thy breast;
Low words of comfort come from thee
Yet my soul has no rest.
For I am but a startled thing
Nor can I ever be
Aught save a bird whose broken wing
Must fly away from thee.
I cannot give to thee the love
I gave so long ago,
The love that turned and struck me down
Amid the blinding snow.
I can but give a failing heart
And weary eyes of pain,
A faded mouth that cannot smile
And may not laugh again.
Yet keep thine arms around me, love,
Until I fall to sleep;
Then leave me, saying no goodbye
Lest I might wake, and weep.
Diana Holman Hunt, granddaughter of William Holman Hunt and revealer of the family secrets, claimed that Lizzie became pregnant by Rossetti, resulting in either a miscarriage or an illegal abortion. She claimed Lizzie then went off sex and attributed Rossetti’s affairs to her new reluctance to sleep with him. This rumour was gossip passed down through the family which may have been true or may have been malicious. It is unlikely Lizzie had an abortion – abortion in the 1850s was crude and usually resulted in infertility, and Lizzie went on to conceive more than one child. In a tragically high percentage of Victorian cases abortion proved fatal to the mother, through haemorrhaging after the operation or via infection sustained during the crudely executed procedure. A miscarriage is, however, possible as Lizzie was addicted to laudanum early in their relationship, which would have made the chances of a pregnancy going to full term highly unlikely. There were also various “remedies” suggested to unwilling mothers-to-be, which included sudden and rigorous exercise, such as horse-riding, running or vigorous walking. This could explain the long, exerting walks Lizzie and Rossetti took when he visited her in Sussex.
It has been common for biographers to question whether Rossetti ever genuinely loved Lizzie, offering instead the suggestion that, having made vague promises to her, he was reluctant and too guilty to shake her off entirely, perhaps fearful of a breach-of-promise lawsuit (after all, her father was famous for lawsuits, what with Hope Hall and his threat to take Millais to court after Ophelia). Yet when one reads t
hrough Rossetti’s correspondence, as well as through letters and diaries written by others in his circle, there is no doubt that Rossetti was very much in love with Lizzie. In the years 1853 to 1855 they were almost inseparable – they rowed passionately and occasionally spent time apart, but the bond between them remained intensely strong. Their relationship survived Lizzie’s bad health and Rossetti’s hurtful infidelities and they were still able to remain adoring of one another. They did separate for around 18 months in the late 1850s, but it was not a permanent separation and neither began a serious relationship with anyone else while they were apart. Rossetti became convinced that what he and Lizzie had was an almost celestial relationship, building on his initial comment to Madox Brown that he had glimpsed his destiny the first time he saw Lizzie. In 1854 he wrote his poem “Sudden Light” which contains the lines:
You have been mine before –
How long ago I may not know.
Perpetuating the Dante and Beatrice legend, Rossetti cast himself and Lizzie in the roles of reincarnated lovers, evinced in his doppelgänger painting How They Met Themselves – a painting he worked on for the entire length of their courtship.
Even the sceptical William Rossetti recorded that his brother was “deeply and profusely in love” with Lizzie and that he presumed she was “sincerely in love with him”. Like all couples, they had their problems, but at no time did Rossetti end the relationship permanently. He was unfaithful and for the duration of these affairs may well have believed he was no longer in love with Lizzie – in 1856, Ford Madox Brown records in his diary: “Emma called on Miss Sid. yesterday who is ill and complaining much of Gabriel. He seems to have transformed his affections to Annie Miller and does nothing but talk of her to Miss Sid. He is mad past cure.” But whenever these affairs reached their conclusion, Rossetti always returned to Lizzie, apologetic, cajoling and apparently as deeply in love with her as before.
On October 6, 1854, Ford Madox Brown recorded in his diary a loving scene he had witnessed at Rossetti’s studio. In writing about it he used the pet name Lizzie and Rossetti used for one another, “Guggum”, sometimes abbreviated to “Gug”:
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