H.D. and the Victorian Spectres of White Rose and the Red

This essay analyzes the "shadows of myth" that enshroud legendary Pre-Raphaelite icon, Elizabeth Siddal. The casting of the spectral Siddal as Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model, muse, and wife are roles about which H. D. speculates in her novelized biography, White Rose and the Red (1948). This essay examines the Victorian legacy that so preoccupied H.D. in the 1940s through the act of literary haunting. Siddal, as it turns out, is an especially provoking spectre that H.D. uses to embody the modernist repudiation and appropriation of their nineteenth-century predecessors.