Rossetti

This 1899 biography captures the turbulent life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter-poet who fundamentally altered the course of Victorian art. Written with intimate knowledge of her subject, H. C. Marillier traces Rossetti's journey from his Italian immigrant family's London home through his founding of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to his later years of creative brilliance and personal turmoil. The book illuminates his relationships with contemporaries like William Morris and John Ruskin, his revolutionary paintings that rejected academic conventions, and the poetic works he produced alongside his visual art. Marillier particularly excels at depicting the emotional stakes of Rossetti's life: the obsessive intensity he brought to both his art and his relationships, the shadows of mental illness that plagued him, and the scandal that surrounded his exhuming of his wife Elizabeth Siddal's body to retrieve his buried poems. This remains an essential portrait of an artist who refused to choose between beauty and darkness.