Desperate Romantics

I've just been watching 'Desperate Romantics'. A sexed up story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

All the episodes, but this one in particular, showed Rosetti acting like a textbook 'N'. He had a beautiful muse, Elizabeth Siddal, whom he pursued relentlessly and started an affair with, but he wouldn't marry her, and kept taking other lovers. There was a great gaslighting scene in which she discovers some drawings that he's done of a prostitute (inbetween some very graphic sex scenes) and he rages at her that she's always jealous of other women and that their relationship is nothing more than "arguments punctuated by sex" (pretty much what xN said to me).

She leaves him, after telling him that he can't love, and disappears, eventually reappearing, ill and hooked on laudanum. He panics and offers to marry her, after promising that he would forsake all his other lovers, but tells his friends later that he doesn't think he can keep his promise and that he thought she would die before he got her to the altar.

I've just looked them up on wikipedia and found this:

"Ruskin also admonished Rossetti in his letters for not marrying Siddal and giving her the security she needed. During this period Siddal also began to write poetry, often with dark themes about lost love or the impossibility of true love."

"Siddal travelled to Paris and Nice for several years for her health. She returned to England in 1860 to marry Rossetti. The Wedding took place on Wednesday, May 23, 1860, at St. Clement's Church in the seaside town of Hastings. They had no family or friends present, just a couple of witnesses whom they had asked in Hastings. At the time of their wedding, she was so frail from illness that she had to be carried to the church, despite it being a 5 minute walk from where she was staying. Rosetti donated a painting to the church as a thank you, and it remains in the church to this day."

"Lizzie's prominence in Rossetti's works decreased as their love faded and she became increasingly ill."

"After the wedding, as soon as Lizzie was well enough, the Rossettis left for their honeymoon in France. In the previous ten years he had been engaged to her and then broken it off at the last minute several times. Stress from those incidents had affected her. She was now severely depressed and her long illness had given her access to and addiction to laudanum. In 1861, Siddal became pregnant. She was overjoyed about this, but the pregnancy ended in a stillborn daughter. Siddal overdosed on laudanum shortly after becoming pregnant for a second time. Rossetti discovered her unconscious and dying in bed."

"Rossetti again represented Lizzie as Dante's Beatrice in one of his most famous works, Beata Beatrix, (1864-1870) which he painted as a memorial to Lizzie after her death. In the work, amidst a yellow haze of relatively indistinct shapes, including Florence's Ponte Vecchio and the figures of Dante and Love, Lizzie sits, representing Dante's Beatrice. With an upturned chin and closed eyes, Lizzie appears keenly aware of her impending fate, death. A bird, which serves as the messenger of death, places a poppy in her hands. Critics have praised the piece for its emotional resonance, which can be felt simply through the work's moving coloring and composition. The true history of Rossetti and his beloved wife further deepens its meaning; although their love had waned at that point, Lizzie still exerted a powerful influence on the artist."

Idealisation after death?

He apparently buried a book of poems in her hair when she was buried and later had it exhumed.