Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 to 1882) was an English painter and poet, born in London to an Italian exile, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848. He is remembered for close up portraits of dreaming women, above all Beata Beatrix, and for a story that sounds invented: in 1862 he buried a notebook of his poems in his wife's coffin, and in 1869 he had it dug up again.
Most people who type his name have just seen one of his women and want to know who she was. In the best known of them, the model is his wife, Elizabeth Siddal.
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Elizabeth Siddal died in February 1862 of an overdose of laudanum, a tincture of opium sold freely at the time. The inquest called it accidental. She was buried at Highgate Cemetery, and before the coffin was closed her husband laid in it the only complete manuscript of his poems.
Seven years later he wanted it back. He regretted giving up the only complete manuscript, and he wanted the poems printed. His business manager, Charles Augustus Howell, saw to the grave. On the night of 5 October 1869, with a lawyer, a doctor and two workmen standing by, the grave was opened and the notebook was taken out. Rossetti was not there.
The book came back soaked through, and it had to be treated with disinfectants before anyone could read it. He wrote that the poem Jenny had "a great worm-hole right through every page", though he thought the book "not hopeless". The poems were printed in 1870.
The tale that Siddal's red hair had grown to fill the coffin is widely repeated. Rossetti's own letter says only that all in the coffin was found "quite perfect". Who she was before that night is the part the legend leaves out.
What You'll Discover
Why he stopped showing his paintings.
Who she was before the coffin.
What the bird is carrying.
Who took her place on the canvas.
The review that broke him.
How the last decade ended.