Re-Presentations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portrayals in Fiction, Drama, Music, and Film
Powered By Xquantum

Re-Presentations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Portrayals in Fiction ...

Chapter 1:  Introduction
Read
image Next
wife was now in a condition when she constructed every absence as an infidelity; she took her own life, leaving beside her bed a letter to Rossetti reproaching him with his cruelty towards her. (Waugh 110)
About the exhumation, Waugh wrote,
On his return from London he permitted and assisted in the preliminary formalities necessary for the recovery of the manuscript of his poems….This took place at night, under Howell’s supervision, and while it was being done Rossetti sat alone at the house of a friend in a fever of conflicting emotions. A fire was lighted by the grave and the coffin opened. It is said that the body was not unduly disfigured, but that some of the hair came away with the book. (152)

Although the title of Waugh’s work declares its subject to be the “Life and Works” of Rossetti, the main character is absent from much of the text. It is a piecemeal work, with much commentary devoted to other figures of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, rather than a focused biography. Even with respect to Rossetti, Waugh writes more as an art critic than as a true biographer. He allows to stand the stereotype of Rossetti as a sensual man whose life was devoted to painting a variety of beautiful women and to their subsequent seduction. Marsh maintains that this characterization “was increasingly common in contemporary fiction and drama and in large measure the alteration in Rossetti’s character was a direct reflection of the age” (Marsh, Legend 87).

The alteration of the perception of Rossetti’s character was amplified four years later, in 1932, by Violet Hunt’s The Wife of Rossetti, Her Life and Death. Marsh elucidates Hunt’s

personal connections with Pre-Raphaelitism: her father was a landscape painter acquainted with Holman Hunt and Madox Brown, and she herself had been to school with the daughters of William Morris and Burne-Jones. Over the years she had heard, and retained and recirculated a good deal of gossip about the famous brotherhood. (97)