The (mostly) Complete Poems of Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal is a superb collection of all 16 complete poems by Elizabeth Siddal. The goal of this refined edition is to put Elizabeth's poetry into a new perspective, as the recognition she didn’t fully obtain during her lifetime, partly spent in the shade of her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

We discuss the challenges of dealing with the work of the best-known of all Pre-Raphaelite muses, with the creative minds behind the project, and discover that Siddal’s works can still easily resonate with contemporary readers.

You have been working on Elizabeth for some time. I would like to start by asking what fascinates you the most about her.

K: That’s a good question. I think the thing I find most compelling is that she’s such a good poet and also almost completely ignored and unknown. There are no popular books of her poetry in print (apart from ours); she’s not anthologized, and the things that people know about her are mostly either wrong or irrelevant. So it’s partially the fact that she’s a discoverable mystery—like the X-Files, the truth, at least some of it, is out there. So if you’re willing to spend time in archives reading letters, there are discoveries to be made to piece together her story. When her brother-in-law, William Michael Rossetti, wrote the paltry little biographical sketches of her he put in his books about his brother, Jan Marsh points out that at least two of her siblings were still alive, and he didn’t bother to talk to them; he just writes, “Oh, I don’t know very much about” her”—which is weird for someone who knew her for a decade and ostensibly lived with her.

T: I’m endlessly fascinated by the ongoing mystery that surrounds her 32 years of life. As is the case with so many women in the 19th century and before, what we know of her is based almost exclusively on the impressions and prejudices of those she met and knew and had disagreements with. They assign motives and thoughts to her that may or may not be true. In the case of Michael and Christina Rossetti, as well as many of Dante Rossetti’s friends who viewed Elizabeth as an interloper, someone who took Dante away from them and interfered with his social life, they looked at her with skepticism and even hostility. Is it any wonder that she might appear sullen or say something sarcastic when she was met with anything but warmth? Her surviving letters… and there are few… show a woman who valued friendship, had a lively sense of humor, and was deeply observant. The hope is that more of her personality will be revealed as more documents emerge.

The two published books are real gems, also from a visual point of view. How did the idea of combining Siddall's poems with photographic images come about?

K: Entirely accidentally. I think a photographer's style is just a collection of things that bother them. You know, your whole artistic life is looking at a 360-degree world and trying to take a little rectangle and find some part of that sphere where all the shapes in that frame please you. That’s really it. And one of the things that pleases me is words and photos together. I love collections of photos and poetry. In my previous life I was a poet, and that’s stuck with me even as I’ve written less and less. So there’s always that in the background, even though we didn’t start making those images with that in mind.

Trillian and I had found Elizabeth’s poems scattered in three biographies of her husband, discovered there was no book of her work, copied them out by hand, and took them with us to England, where we were on vacation. And we were really just reading her poems, daily, and taking photos like tourists do and the poems started to shape our mood and that mood started to suggest different bits of the world that would go into that frame of things that somehow soothed my unquiet artist’s mind. And with that influence already there, posting them to social media with snippets of her poems just seemed like the thing to do. And apparently, it was the right thing, because other people felt it too.

T: We struggled with how many poems to include in the photo book. We wanted the world to read her words, and the photos had been deeply inspired by the imagery and mood of her poetry, but we didn’t want it to seem like we were attempting to illustrate her poems and put a literal slant to them. And that’s when the idea, which quickly became a need, to publish a separate volume of her poetry came to us. A book that would be solely Elizabeth’s.

While putting Elizabeth's poems together, what struck you most about her lyrical style?

K: The immediacy, accessibility, truth and honesty of it. Her poems are about being angry at a lover who’s betrayed her, about becoming jaded by romantic relationships, about the fear of dying, about wanting someone you can’t have, and to me these are all emotions I’ve had and situations I’ve found myself in. And they’re all short and unpretentious. I find them in many ways really modern.

T: Karl Merrick of the Pre-Raphaelite Society, said it perfectly when he observed that there is something of the English folk-music tradition in Siddal’s verse, and you really hear this when the poems are read aloud. I would encourage everyone who has access to her poetry to recite the verse and give in to the beauty of the rhythm and also the points of counter rhythm, where she surprises you with a sudden jolt.

The recent Rossetti exhibition and Jan Marsh's monographic work are just a few examples of contemporary interest in Siddal. What do you think her real role was within the Brotherhood?

K: I suppose a lot of that has been sussed out—largely by Jan Marsh, probably, who's done the deepest dive into her life. But Elizabeth Siddal was really an integral part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—she was a brother—and she was the gear between that and what’s been dubbed the Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood, made up of a bunch of people, but Christina Rossetti, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Jane Burden, Annie Miller, Fanny Cornforth, Effie Ruskin/Millais, and Alexa Wilding. Apart from Christina Rossetti, who was a poet, most of the Pre-Raphaelite sisterhood were models who PRB artists became obsessed with. So often they're famous for being rather than doing.

Elizabeth spanned that bridge because she was a painter and a poet herself, so she was actually a creative and artistic force, but she was also an extremely popular model, and one of the very early ones, so, I think—and, caveat emptor, there are people who know better—but I think that her face appearing so early in that movement helped set a style. Art and fashion movements come along all the time that take things which are out of favor and flip that around, Twiggy comes to mind -- she came onto the scene when Marilyn Monroe was all the rage and flipped the fashion world and suddenly everybody was all about androgynous models with pixie haircuts. In Victorian England, being a redhead was a really unfortunate thing. Anne of Green Gables says, “Red hair is my lifelong sorrow.”. Particularly women from the lower classes had a difficult time if they had red hair, and one of the things Rossetti actually did, relatively successfully, as an artist over the years, was to be continually and maniacally infatuated with women who were physically out of fashion and then just turning the tides of popularity and forming fashion to his archetype.

He did this with Jane Burden too, but I think that Elizabeth being there so early on and being a model that so many of the painters in that circle were using helped to stamp an aesthetic on that movement. And then at the same time, she was painting, and then on top of that, she was in the social circle, so she’s being painted, she’s painting, she’s writing poetry, she’s spending time at parties talking about art with John Ruskin and Swinburne and William Morris and all those other people. So, while that artistic movement would have existed without her, it would have existed differently if any facet of her involvement were plucked out. And, part of the whole problem of her legacy, I think, is due to that—some people have thought that she was intruding, intellectually, where she didn’t belong and have spent a lot of effort trying to pluck her out of that place.

T: Kyle says it perfectly. It is interesting that so much of her contribution (and the same is true of Jane Burden Morris, whose contributions to the William Morris Co.’s embroidery design have only recently been fully realized) was forgotten or ignored, and it is with the recent exhibitions and studies of her work and life that she’s re-emerged as more than a muse and canvas for the PRB and as a true member of the Brotherhood, one whose artistic work Dante Rossetti was inspired and influenced by as much as she was by his. I think the fact that she died so young and so tragically cemented her image as the tragic muse, the Ophelia and the Beatrice, and gave those who wanted to sublimate her influence ample time and opportunity to do so.

May I ask you what future projects you are working on?

K: So many things. Some of them are super top secret now, so we can’t talk about them, but coming up, we’ve written a play about Jane Burden that’s either called “Just Jane” or “Unfaithful, Too Striking,” and we’re going to be doing a reading of that early in 2025, and then it’s probably back into revisions. We have, hopefully, an upcoming book about Jane, which was actually our original Pre-Raphaelite project that got sidetracked by this collection of poems, and we do also have another highly secret Elizabeth Siddal project in the works. Plus an album of Elizabeth’s poems with UK singer/songwriter Evi Vine that should come out in just a few months. I forgot about that one. That’s nearly done.