Selected Poems

Elizabeth Siddal wrote her poems in secret, never expecting them to see the light of day. When she died at thirty-two in 1862, her husband William Holman Hunt discovered hundreds of verses she had hidden away, some in her pillow. This collection gathers fifteen of those rare, haunting poems that the Pre-Raphaelite circle once considered the most honest verse written by a woman of her generation. Her poetry moves through the dark territories of desire and despair, of love that will not be spoken and death that will not be named. These are not gentle verses. They ache. They burn. They confront what it means to want badly and lose completely. Siddal modeled for paintings that made her famous, but she wrote verses that revealed what the paintings could not: a mind as restless and as tortured as any poet of her age. These poems are the evidence that the Pre-Raphaelites saw her face but never fully heard her heart. Now, finally, we can.