Elizabeth Siddal - Marriage, Ill-health and Death

Marriage, Ill-health and Death

Siddal travelled to Paris and Nice for several years for her health. She returned to England in 1860 to marry Rossetti. Their wedding took place on Wednesday 23 May 1860 at St Clement's Church in the seaside town of Hastings. There were 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 and ill that she had to be carried to the church, despite it being a five minute walk from where she was staying. There is a sanctuary lamp in the church commemorating the wedding and a memorial to Rossetti. After the wedding, as soon as Siddal was well enough, they left for a honeymoon in France.

In the previous ten years Rossetti had been engaged to her, he had broken it off at the last minute several times and was known to have had affairs with other women. Stress from the incidents had affected her and she used her frequent and serious illnesses to blackmail him. She became severely depressed and her long illness gave her access to laudanum to which she became addicted. In 1861, Siddal became pregnant. She was overjoyed but the pregnancy ended with the birth of a stillborn daughter. Siddal overdosed on laudanum in 1862 shortly after becoming pregnant for a second time. Rossetti discovered her unconscious and dying in bed. Although her death was ruled accidental by the coroner, there are suggestions that Rossetti found a suicide note. Consumed with grief and guilt Rossetti went to see Ford Madox Brown who is supposed to have instructed him to burn the note – under the law at the time suicide was both illegal and immoral and would have brought a scandal on the family, and suicide would bar Siddal from a Christian burial.

Overcome with grief, Rossetti enclosed in his wife's coffin a journal containing the only copy he had of his many poems. He supposedly slid the book into Siddal's red hair. She was interred at Highgate Cemetery in London. By 1869, Rossetti was chronically addicted to drugs and alcohol. He had convinced himself he was going blind and couldn't paint. He began to write poetry. Before publishing his newer poems he became obsessed with retrieving the poems he had slipped into his wife's coffin. Rossetti and his agent, Charles Augustus Howell, applied to the Home Secretary for an order to have her coffin exhumed. It was done in the dead of night to avoid public curiosity and attention, and Rossetti was not present. Howell reported that her corpse was remarkably well preserved and her delicate beauty intact. Her hair was said to have continued to grow after death so that the coffin was filled with her flowing coppery hair. The manuscript was retrieved although a worm had burrowed through the book so that some of the poems were difficult to read. Rossetti published the old poems with his newer ones; they were not well received by some critics because of their eroticism, and he was haunted by the exhumation through the rest of his life.

Seven years after his wife's death, Rossetti published a collection of sonnets entitled The House of Life; contained within it was the poem, "Without Her". It is a reflection on life once love has departed:

What of her glass without her? The blank grey

There where the pool is blind of the moon's face.

Her dress without her? The tossed empty space

Of cloud-rack whence the moon has passed away.

Her paths without her? Day's appointed sway

Usurped by desolate night. Her pillowed place

Without her? Tears, ah me! For love's good grace,

And cold forgetfulness of night or day.

What of the heart without her? Nay, poor heart,

Of thee what word remains ere speech be still?

A wayfarer by barren ways and chill,

Steep ways and weary, without her thou art,

Where the long cloud, the long wood's counterpart,

Sheds doubled up darkness up the labouring hill.

-- From Without Her