The bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal

It's very difficult to judge a marriage from outside. It's not impossible. That we can say things such as, "They seemed so happy" or "I never thought they'd make it" tells us that sometimes we can judge correctly. That may seem odd but admitting you were wrong about something is only possible if you later were able to figure out the truth. "I used to think your house was blue" means that I now know it isn't.

And what of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal? No one I've ever read thinks it was  happy marriage. That's not what's at issue. The question is, how good a wife was Elizabeth Siddal?

Most of us tend to think she was good. DGR himself loved her obsessively. And Siddal worked hard to flourish as an artist and as a person. And her life was tragic. To question her goodness now would be like kicking a puppy. A really cute puppy that everyone loved.

I don't know any different. For years now, I've seen her as an admirable figure. Just this morning though, I was reading a piece called "The bias against Fanny Cornforth" and it got me wondering, could there be an equal bias in favour of Elizabeth Siddal?

This is all hypothesis but here's the case.

The whole thing hinges on Dante Gabriel Rossetti himself. He loved her. Could he have been wrong? Could he have been deluded? Unfortunately, just to ask the question is to answer it. DGR was a man given to romanticizing women, exaggerating their beauty, their intelligence and their character. You might argue that DGR's praise of Siddal was exaggerated in a way that harmed her but you can't reasonable suggest it wasn't exaggerated.

Now, there is nothing unusual about this. A lot of men are capable of attributing all sorts of nonsense to a woman they love. And we are capable of maintaining these delusions in the face of incredible evidence to the contrary.

Don't be binary about this. To be honest about Siddal, we do not have to go to the opposite pole and conclude that she was evil. We just need to be willing to acknowledge that we have blinders on the subject, blinders we have inherited from DGR and generations of writers about him, and look around to see what evidence there might be.