Institutional email: Natalie.Reeve.2017@live.rhul.ac.uk

My project explores the influential self-fictionalisation of the Pre-Raphaelite artist-poets Elizabeth Siddal and Dante Rossetti, a radical interdisciplinary intervention into Siddal/Rossetti scholarship which also examines broader questions about self-fashioning, inspiration, and the relationship of the arts with the truth and the past. I will analyse Siddal and Rossetti’s representations of themselves and their relationship, and track how others interpreted what they left. I will discuss the artistic and biographical conflicts that arose when Rossetti’s ‘muse’ became a rival artist. Next, I will show how this comparatively private self-mythologising became a public fascination when Rossetti exhumed the poems he placed in Siddal’s coffin, exposing the couple and their corpus to macabre new scrutiny. Finally, I will posit these elements as the inspiration behind innovations in Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Stoker’s Dracula, and examine the friction between the revisionist criticism that would de-mystify Siddal, and the neo- Victorian fictionalisations which embrace a supernatural ‘myth’.Siddal and Rossetti’s creative self-fashioning has not been sufficiently scrutinised. The exhumation, which gave Siddal and Rossetti’s story fantastical visibility, and introduced the idea of Siddal’s sinister ever-growing hair, also needs critical consideration. Deborah Cherry, Griselda Pollock and Jan Marsh began the recovery of Siddal as an artist, but I wish to move from reclamation to reappraisal – of Siddal and Rossetti’s deliberate intermingling of life and art, and the precedent this set for others to do the like. I will draw on many archives and resources, particularly the Tate’s Pre-Raphaelite collection, the Rossetti papers and editions of Stoker and Wilde in the British Library, and the Siddal/Rossetti drawings in the Ashmolean and Fitzwilliam Museums. I will apply for the Delaware Art Museum’s Visiting Fellowship in Pre-Raphaelite Studies to research their collection, and work with the Open Graves, Open Minds project to explore Siddal’s exhumation and her influence on vampirism.