Last Halloween was a busy time for me. On my way from London to Wolverhampton, I had the pleasure to spend the Day of the Dead's eve with would-be witches, feminists and 19th century buffs. It's totally by chance that I bumped into the Dead Women Poets Society online. Run by a team of dynamic editors, scholars and emergent writers, the DWPS meets about twice or three times during the year in different venues on the basis of open-mic sessions, to increase past or contemporary female writers' visibility. Everyone is welcome to take the stage by storm, providing you'll share something by a dead woman poet.
Not only did this event appeal to my fascination for all things macabre, but what a coincidence it was to discover that their Halloween edition was dedicated to resurrecting Mina Loy and none other than... Lizzie Siddal. Silly me, "My Ladys Soul", that is, the complete revision of Siddal's poems by Dr Serena Trowbridge, had been published just 2 months before. It all made sense.
What I expected even less was that, after shily approaching Jasmine Simms, in charge of the Halloween edition, it would be decided that I'd become part of the main event and interviewed.
The DWPS members describe their sessions as "séances" akin to late 19th century attempts to communicate with the dead, when spiritualism was at its highest. This particular one took place in the Poetry Café, a veggie restaurant and performance venue located in the heart of Covent Garden. After introducing the DWPS to its audience, Helen gave the mic over to Jasmine who had prepared a brief summary of Siddal's biography. Jasmine read a couple of poems, including the very Gothic-one "Silent Wood". My turn now... nervous as hell, shivering like a leaf, I had had less than an hour to prepare my speech sipping a pint of cider in a nearby pub on my out of the British Museum. Here it goes:
Thank you for giving me this fantastic opportunity tonite. I am afraid that, unlike Lizzie and many of you present in this room, I am not really a poet. I belong to the worst kind, the type most artists dread or despise. I side with the unfortunate souls of critics, commentators and researchers. Those who were not brave enough to create themselves but prefer to act backstage, in the shade of these great figures. Those who look at the art to write about it.
My name is Lo, and I work in the field of art history and gender studies. So tonite, I won't be so much sharing something that I created, a piece of my own, but rather personal recollections that led me to get interested in the strange case of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal.
Our story began a couple of years ago, in London. I met with Lizzie in the winter of 2006 or 2007. By then I had no idea who she was. Drowning in water, a pale lady loitering in some embroidered dress stood against the greenery and the mud. This lean figure had a floating mass of copper hair and luminescent skin highlighted by the flush on her cheeks. Most noticeable were her rosy childlike lips and heavy lidded forget-me-not coloured eyes.
I didn't need a crazy amount of time to recognise Hamlet's beloved driven to madness and suicide, the entrancing and bewitching Ophelia. In fact, I had seen the painting before, in black and white reproduction but it didn't have that effect on me back then.
Siddal was born on 25th July 1829 in Central London, the daughter of a lower middle-class family. Her father Charles has been described by various sources as a cutler or an ironmonger, and he was from Sheffield. By 1831 the Siddal household moved to Southwark. It is not really clear how Lizzie got acquainted with poetry but the girls seem to have received some basical literary education. According to William Michael Rossetti, her brother-in-law, Liz discovered the Poet Laureate, Lord Alfred Tennyson, when she was very young, on some butter wrap paper.
She entered the Pre-Raphaelite circle aged 20 when working as a milliner in Leicester Square. Partly self-taught, Lizzie had no troubles integrating the literary references of the P.R.B as her lover with whom she learned to draw was a writer himself and translator of Dante. However, and still today, Lizzie remains unknown as a Victorian poet. This elusive figure, described by Christina Rossetti "not as she is, but as she fills his dream" was and is constantly deemed as a pale reflection of the famous painter-poet, Dante Gabriel. Yet it is he who demanded his sister in a letter "not to rival with the Sid". Convinced that Siddal had genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti collaborated intensively with her in word and image from 1852 to 1860.
But the most sensational events of the couple's relationship have unfortunately overshadowed Siddal's creative merits. In an act of desperation, after her death (or potential suicide?) by an overdose of laudanum on 11th February 1862, Rossetti buried his sonnet sequence The House of Life, with her. Possessed by the ghost of his dead wife, Rossetti immortalised her in several versions of the same painting, Beata Beatrix. She was his muse, his source of inspiration, his one true love, but also the demon tormenting him every nite.
He resorted to spiritualism. Like her, he became addicted to opium and lived an eccentric, recluse life. And for that precise reason, he agreed, under the pressure of Charles Augustus Howell's manipulation, to exhume the coffin and recover the poems (provided he didn't perform the terrible deed).
The abominable act took place in Highgate Cemetery, in a cold dark evening of October 1869. When Howell returned he told Rossetti that Siddal's hair had kept growing luxuriant in the grave, covering some kind of immaculate corpse. Only the manuscript had partly been eaten by worms. And thus, the legend of Lizzie Siddal grew. Some strange rumours started to emerge in Northern London, about the ghost lady with red hair who abducted children and ate them alive. The vampire of Highgate tale was enough, to, apparently, inspire Bram Stoker and create the character of Lucy Westenra, the first female bitten by Count Dracula.
You see? Lizzie's figure is more than enough to feed our imagination. This is why I have chosen to share with you some of her most gloomy poems, precisely those she was criticised for. In her ballads, fragments and lyrical verse, dramatisation and sense of narrative prove them to be self-conscious works of art. Incomplete and difficult to read, these words by her hand were edited by the Rossetti brothers. For the first time, some are being read in their original form. Contrary to what has been said, I don't think they were particularly designed as expressions of personal grief. To me they belong integrally to her oeuvre.
True Love
Farewell Earl Richard,
Tender and brave:
Kneeling I kiss
The dust from your gave.
Pray for me Richard,
Lying alone
With hands pleading earnestly,
All in white stone
Soon I must leave thee,
This sweet summer tide,
That other is waiting,
To claim his pale Bride.
Soon I'll return to thee,
Hopeful and brave,
When the dead leaves,
Blow over thy grave,
Then shall they find me
Close at thy head
Watching or waking,
Sleeping or dead.
My thanks again to all the organisers and participants of the Dead Women Poets Society who truly made this Halloween 2018 special, if not magical
