| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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Rossetti had doubts about actually marrying Lizzie. Moreover, Scott maintained that there were “other ladies beside Miss Siddal coming within his orbit” (qtd. in Marsh, Legend 39). In this, he was the first to make direct reference to Rossetti’s relationship with Fanny Cornforth. Ironically, Scott, who remained close to Rossetti during the latter’s difficult final years, undermined the positive image the artist’s family had attempted to foster.
In 1928, when the centenary of Rossetti’s birth stimulated another flurry of interest, Evelyn Waugh obtained a commission to write Rossetti, His Life and Works. Intent on taking a fresh approach, one intended, according to Marsh, to be “informed by a new skepticism,” Waugh also felt himself to be “free from offending Rossetti’s family” (Legend 85). His view of Rossetti was not unfriendly, but if he was charitable toward his subject it was because he had a tolerant attitude toward what he believed to be his many flaws. Rossetti was, he remarked early in the book, “a man of the South, sensual, indolent, and richly versatile” (Waugh 13). Believing that Gabriel and Lizzie’s relationship was fundamentally flawed, Waugh characterized them as having a basic incompatibility: “He was lacking, in fact, in every domestic virtue except affection, and with that he was endowed with an overpowering degree.” This made him “an odd mate for the wraith” he married, while she “was simply physically overpowered, faltered, and flickered out” (Waugh 101). Almost as an afterthought, Waugh evaluated the rumors about Lizzie’s death: