The Pre-Raphaelite paintings chose some of the most beautiful women to be the models for their paintings, but the life of Elizabeth Siddal has touched me greatly and her tragic death as haunting as the painting of Ophelia that her life came to mirror... 
Siddal has a profound effect on the Pre-Raphaelites, her beauty was outstanding, one wife of an artist has called her a 'vision' and she played an important part in their views of feminine beauty. William Rossetti describes her as such, 'a most beautiful creature with an air between dignity and sweetness with something that exceeded modest self-respect and partook of disdainful reserve; tall, finely-formed with a lofty neck and regular yet somewhat uncommon features, greenish-blue unsparkling eyes, large perfect eyelids, brilliant complexion and a lavish heavy wealth of coppery golden hair." Rossetti quickly fell in love with her and only used her as his model for his art work.Their love for one another was full of passion and dispair, the latter mainly for Siddal who Rossetti continually tortured her state of mind by his lack of commitment. Rossetti had called off his engagement to Siddal several times which was one of the main causes for her depression and sudden illness, this also lead her to become addicted to laudanum. When they finally married, Siddal was so weak that she was carried to the church.
Siddal started to recover and a year late became pregnant, however she gave birth to a stillborn daughter. This period was a very dark for 'Lizzie' as she was known as, a friend wrote a letter of meeting Siddal after the death, 'When we went to see Lizzie for the first time after her recovery, we found her sitting in a low chair with the childless cradle on the floor beside her, and she looked like Gabriel’s Ophelia when she cried with a kind of soft wildness as we came in, "Hush, Ned, you’ll waken it!".' Clearly she struggled to accept the death of her daughter, that when she became pregnant again, she took an overdose of laudanum. She was thought to have been happy the evening before and the coroner ruled her death as accidental, but many believe that she left a suicide note for Rossetti and her fears of suffering from another infantile death.
Her life opitimised the life of Hamlets character 'Ophelia', she was ill-treated by the one she loved and suffered great tragedy. She was also a talented woman who created her own artwork and poetry, she did not just wish to be a model. The reason why I have written about this woman it seems as if her life was marred by the Pre-Raphaelites who tried to create beauty and Romanticism in their pictures. Georgiana Burne-Jones commented in their marriage, 'I then received an impression which never wore away, of romance and tragedy between her and her husband'. It seemed as if their love was a piece of art they had created together and has become immortal in Rossetti's posthumous of Lizzie in the painting 'Beata Beatrix'. Her beauty and his love and emotion for her, stopped in time.....
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