Three Books About Elizabeth Siddall

While Elizabeth Siddall is well known as an artist, model and muse, portrayed in the many drawings of her reading and sleeping, her activity as a poet has been less investigated. In place of the familiar interpretation of the poetry of Elizabeth Siddall (1829-62) as autobiographical outpourings of raw unfiltered emption, Siddall’s poems considered as performative and declaratory, stages for varied protagonists with distinctive voices to offer elegiac reflections on grief and loss, gentle counsel, loving care, wistful regret, imperious declaration, and what Christina Rossetti identified as “a cool bitter sarcasm”. Often cast as dramatic monologues, a nineteenth-century poetic form that demands the separation of poet and protagonist, Siddall’s poems are interlocutory, addressed to speakers who are often unidentified, unseen and sometimes unhearing. This analysis of Siddall as a poet with a distinctive autonomous voice is based on Zadie Smith’s elucidation of the distinctive position of the writer as “the ‘I-who-is- not-me’ put forward in her essay collection Feel Free. 2018. Siddall’s poems offer a range of emotional registers from the lyrical and regretful to outspoken anger at the power relations between men and women that see women only in terms of appearance. Her poems evidence that she was well read in contemporary poetic forms, such as the dramatic monologue, as well as Romantic poetry and historic ballads, Shakespeare, Christian texts and hymns. The materiality of Siddall's surviving poetic manuscripts is discussed.