| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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no family introductions, no wedding preparations. The exact date of the engagement could not be fixed” (Marsh, Legend 360). To account for this uncertainty, Knight offers this explanation: “At Miss Siddall’s request the contract was kept secret, and its first publication to Rossetti’s close friends seems to have been contrary to her wishes” (Knight 71). Knight stresses Gabriel’s love for Lizzie and depicts him as an exemplary husband (Knight 71–72). Although they flouted Victorian standards of courtship, the couple painted by Knight is a romantic one, deeply in love, and wounded by the cruelty of death. Knight writes of the exhumation, “Rossetti was still averse to the proceeding” right up to the time it took place. “Eventually, however, he yielded a reluctant consent, and the thing was done” (106). Not surprisingly, Knight makes no reference to Rossetti’s relationship with Jane Morris. Nor does he linger over suggestions of Rossetti’s emotional and mental instability, to which some attributed the artist’s final decline. Knight sees a more concrete cause: Buchanan’s savage criticism, which “shocked and pained Rossetti.” He accordingly attributed Rossetti’s decline and death
Knight ends his volume by describing Rossetti as “affectionate always, earnest and playful in turns, expansive and strongly influenced by prevailing moods and fancies” (181). Thus, Knight advances a story influenced by Rossetti’s family and by Brown, his most loyal friend.
Five years later, in 1892, William Bell Scott published his Autobiographical Notes, whose “tame revelations stimulated an enormous amount of sensational speculation about his [Rossetti’s] life and aberrant personality,” Fredeman says (Formative xxvi). Marsh observes that Scott’s account “dealt a damaging blow” to the tale of young love that Knight, influenced by William Michael, had propounded (Legend 39). Scott cast doubt on the whole story of the engagement and implied that