Most of the time a biography will tell you who a person was charting their life from cradle to grave, or in the case of Jordan from one year to the next, but what Jan Marsh has done with this book is that and more.Įlizabeth Siddal was a young woman with striking red hair who was spotted by one of the group of artists known as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and used as a model by a few of them before settling down to become the love interest and eventually wife of Gabriel Rossetti. Of her 'true self' only her paintings, drawings and poetry survive, and these do not admit of simple biographical analysis." She is a contributor to the Dictionary of Women Artists and a frequent lecturer in Britain, North America and Japan."The known facts about Elizabeth's Siddal's life are few knowledge of her personality, opinions and emotions is even scantier. She has also scripted arts documentary programmes for radio and television, and has curated exhibitions of work by women painters of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Jan Marsh (b.1942) has written a number of ground-breaking biographies, including Bloomsbury Women, Jane and May Morris, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal and her highly acclaimed work Christina Rossetti. “The author's steady, sympathetic course through Rossetti's divided life enables readers to delve into the intense and original self most fully expressed in her poetry.” - Kirkus Review
“Jan Marsh's book is the best researched and fullest biography of Rossetti we have yet had.” - Fiona MacCarthy, New York Review of Books
“An excellent addition to Bloomsbury studies that will be of interest to both devotees and newcomers.” – Publishers Weekly ‘Is essential for serious collections in art history, women's studies, or literature.’ – The Library Journal ‘Required reading for all future historians of the movement’ – The Times ‘It turns the familiar terrain of Pre-Raphaelitism on its axis, giving new history, new life to the previously silent subject of the paintings’ – Times Literary Supplement
Jan Marsh reveals the actual lives behind the myth of the Pre-Raphaelite women: Elizabeth Siddal, Emma Brown, Annie Miller, Fannie Cornforth, Jane Morris and Georgiana Burne-Jones.Ī meticulous testimony, this book at last records the rare vitality of these gifted and ambitious women.ĭelivering them from a century of masculine misrepresentation, Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood is a fascinating tribute to their spirit of independence in circumstances which conspired to suppress it. Muses to an exclusively male genius, of tragic stature and uncertain health - were they indeed as passive as their portrait painters and critics contrived to suggest? Who were the women who sat for the Pre-Raphaelite painters?
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