Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal by Elizabeth Siddal (review)

HUMANITIES 415 Army. Wiseman and Cullen are well done, and Professor Schiefen is able to use the Wiseman material to show the interdependence of the condition of the poor and the religious state of the Catholic masses. But Faber and Father Mathew, even Manning, would have fitted in better with what seems to be the editor's wish to set clergy and ministers firmly within the societies to which they preached. The editor does in fact suggest why some are surprisingly present, others surprisingly absent: 'The interests of our contributors largely governed our choices.' Such an ordering principle is suitable and even inevitable in the compiling of a Festschrift but not in the making of a collection with the present title. But it is good to have all the pieces assembled here. In particular, since Anglicans, arguably a religious minority, certainly by the nineteenth century, perhaps since the seventeenth century, have received disproportionate attention from ecclesiastical historians, it is gratifying to have fine studies of such heroes of the nonconformist tradition as Spurgeon and R.W. Dale. Spurgeon must have been a knockout as a preacher, though in retrospect he strikes us as a confused and unattractive man. Dale was an intelligent man whose mind was always working. Itis odd to think that he and Newman captivated, in very different ways, the public of Birmingham, the great capital of the philistines. The publishers have given us a most attractive paper jacket. It conceals a hard cover of singular ugliness. (/.M. CAMERON) Elizabeth Siddal. Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal Edited by Roger C. Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner Wombat Press. xii, 43, illus. $40.00 In his definitive bibliocritical study of Pre-Raphaelitism William Fredeman suggests that Elizabeth Siddal may be 'after all, the only PreRaphaelite .' Since most of us are familiar only with 'Lizzie's' face and coffin, we might consider Fredeman's remark by recalling her pose for Millais's portrait of the drowned Ophelia. The image of her dressed in a floral patterned gown, reclining in bathwater, epitomizes the paradoxical principles of Pre-Raphaelite art: literary or moral subjects depicted in natural settings with a decorative style. Now, at last, we can see how her own work conforms to these principles. In this first collection of her poems and drawings Roger Lewis and Mark Lasner give the wife of Rossetti and the model for so many Pre-Raphaelite paintings the chance to speak for herself. ConSidering her admirers (an infatuated Ruskin preferred Elizabeth's work to Rossetti's and Lady Tennyson invited her to illustrate the laureate's Moxon edition), it is surprising that we have had to wait so long for a collection of her drawings and paintings. Her poems, however, 416 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 were deemed by Christina Rossetti as too sad and too personal: 'How full of beauty they are, but how painful - how they bring poor Lizzie herself before one, with her voice, face, and manner!' Christina concluded that, 'beautiful as they are, they are almost too hopelessly sad for publication en masse.' Yet it is the presence of that specific combination - 'the sense of death and the desire for beauty: recognized by Walter Pater as the key to aesthetic poetry - which makes Elizabeth's whole work so typically Pre-Raphaelite. Beauty and death, the visionary and the earthly, are the combinations explOited to enliven the restless, powerless gestures of those whose world assumes the fantastic clarity that accompanies the jarring awareness of death: Do we clasp dead hands and quiver With an endless joy for ever? Do tall white angels gaze and wend Along the banks where lilies bend? The charge that the poems are too personal is equally unfair. 'Dead Love' reads like Elizabeth's defence of Guenevere and 'True Love' is a ballad through which she controls her response to the death of Walter Deverell. The editors have restored stanzas about a rival lover which William Michael Rossetti had deleted but their generic and thematic arrangement of the poems accentuates her literary development. The first half of the collection is dominated by self-expressive lyrics and the last half is dominated by romantic ballads. The editors place her last...