About

My thesis focuses on the work of the neglected Pre-Raphaelite artist-poet Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862). Moving past the rhetoric of recovery, I wish to explore her corpus’s complicated relationship with her literary and artistic creative predecessors, and with the contemporaries who shared her post-Romantic vantage point. I will focus on Siddal works which retell the stories of the past, whether that be illustrating a Romantic poem, disruptively engaging with the conventions of medieval art, or queering the story of an ancient ballad as translated through a Romantic author. Though Siddal is my titular focus, I will study her not as a solitary genius working in isolation, nor as a ‘woman artist’ in a narrow mould, but as part of numerous creative groups: the Pre-Raphaelite circle, her fellow post-Romantic poets, and her collaborator and husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti. I will show how Siddal shaped and partook in multiple instances of shared creative practice, using strategies developed alongside (and against) her contemporaries to interrogate Romantic ideals and their Victorian afterings. With these as its central considerations, and Siddal as its axis, my thesis aims to be a radical interdisciplinary intervention into Pre-Raphaelite studies, one which brings that field into dialogue with broader questions of inheritance (artistic and poetic), creative inspiration and practice, modernity, self-representation, multi-subjectivity, and the relationship of the arts with the truth and the past.