In Fiction, Drama and Song
Fiona Mountain's 2002 mystery novel Pale as the Dead centres a "genealogical mystery" around the fictional descendants of Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In the novel, their newborn daughter is not stillborn but is stolen by the family doctor, who was in love with Siddal. Elizabeth Siddal's mysterious ailments are explained as a genetic heart defect that has been inherited by her great-great granddaughter Bethany, a young woman who is modelling for photographs inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite paintings.
Mollie Hardwick (author of Upstairs, Downstairs) wrote a mystery novel entitled The Dreaming Damozel in 1990. The plot follows antique dealer Doran Fairweather, who is elated to find a small oil painting she believes to be of Elizabeth Siddal but is shocked when she happens on the body of a girl, floating dead in a pond. The death scene mimics the Millais painting of Ophelia featuring Elizabeth Siddal. Doran' excited by the coincidence and mystery, ignores the advice of her husband who warns her the story of Rossetti and Siddal was plagued by unhappiness.
In Tim Powers' 2012 novel Hide Me Among the Graves, "Lizzie" Siddal is a victim of the vampire John Polidori, her husband's uncle and author of what is likely the first vampire story. This becomes an explanation for her illness and death, as well as for her husband's exhumation of her grave, which is not to regain his poems but is part of a strategy to defeat the vampire.
Rossetti's relationship with Siddal has been the subject of television dramas, notably Dante's Inferno (1967), by Ken Russell, in which she was played by Judith Paris and Rossetti by Oliver Reed; The Love School (1975) in which she was played by Patricia Quinn; and Desperate Romantics (2009) in which she was played by Amy Manson.
Ghostland is a 2001 album by the Seattle neo-psychedelic band The Goblin Market named after a poem by Christina Rossetti, and the album is inspired by the exhumation of Elizabeth Siddal.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Siddal
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