The poems of Elizabeth Siddal in context

A ground breaking new book that considers all Siddal poems with reference to female and primarily male counterparts adding substantially to knowledge of her work as a writer and their shared contemporary concerns. Dante Rossetti Swinburne Tennyson Ruskin and Keats were either known to her or a source of influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with which she was associated and certain of their texts are compared with hers to discuss interplay between erotic and spiritual love the ballad tradition nineteenth-century feminism and the Romantic concept of the conjoined physical and spectral body. Siddal's artwork is used to introduce each chapter while other Pre-Raphaelite paintings illuminate the texts and further the inter-disciplinary philosophy of the Brotherhood. This important and stimulating book focuses on the intrinsic merit of Siddal's poetics whilst advocating a research method that could have multiple applications elsewhere.