| Chapter 1: | Introduction |
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also defends Rossetti’s honor by asserting, “there is no reason to suppose that his models were also his mistresses” (113). She attributes any marital discord to Lizzie’s unwillingness to engage in sexual activity. In fact, Grylls is generally hard on Lizzie: “In the matter of breaking with Lizzie Siddal a more ruthless and single-minded man would have cut his losses” (73). Grylls accepts the official verdict of the inquest: “Elizabeth Eleanor Rossetti had ‘by means aforesaid accidentally and casually and by misfortune come to her death’ ” (89); she cautions, however, that “so much is known, but there are possible differences of emphasis and interpretation” (88). Grylls takes issue with the innuendos alleging intentional suicide or, in the case of Violet Hunt, murder (90). Grylls enhances the story, first circulated by Caine in 1882, that when Lizzie was exhumed she was uncorrupted by death, though she is careful to leave room for doubt: “Howell, thoroughly at home in so romantically macabre a scene, was the one to look first in the coffin and it was he who lifted the book out and reported afterwards that Lizzie’s hair was still miraculously fresh and golden” (129).
Grylls’ real contribution to Rossetti scholarship is her analysis of the correspondence between him and Jane Morris. Marsh speculates that when Rossetti said “to marry one women and then find out, when it is too late, that you love another, is the deepest tragedy that can enter into a man’s life,” he was referring to Jane Morris and that his love for her dated from their meeting during the Oxford Union decoration, a time when he was already committed to Lizzie (83). Grylls argues that the letters do not bear this out (236). She believes this relationship developed only later and that the nature of it is unclear:
She argues that the quality of their love can be detected from their letters.