The Rossetti Diaries

Trends in art, music, literature, and life come and go, but author Kathleen Williams Renk uncovers a most interesting history regarding a group of artists rebelling against idealistic portrayals such as those popularized by the Italian artist Rafael. While Rafael imagined and painted beautiful scenes of Jesus’s life nearly four hundred years before the Rossettis came along, Rossetti and the Pre-Rafaelites preferred to present other viewpoints, often portraying in paint the ugly realities of life such as poverty, prostitution, crime, and societal injustices of Victorian England. The irony of the latter group’s name is certainly one to ponder.

What emerges in Renk’s book The Rossetti Diaries is a captivating tale initiated by the investigative voice of historian and painter Maggie Winegarden. In 2019 Maggie stumbles upon an old Norman church in Hastings (on the southern coast of England) and discovers diaries and letters written by Christina Rossetti—a poet, who also happens to be painter Dante Rossetti’s sister—and her lover Lizzie Siddall, an artist who, much too late, becomes the wife of Dante Rossetti.

Unfolding chronologically, a reader quickly becomes immersed in a Victorian society in which women are used as maids and muses for men’s businesses, including painting and writing. Many women are unable to wrest free financially without being “used” by their financial benefactors. Lizzie and Christina’s diaries and letters reveal the quiet desperation of two women who, though trapped within the strict mores of Victorian society, devise a plan to liberate themselves to create and sell their own work and live freely.

Lizzie’s relationship with Dante Rossetti emerges as most disturbing, though perhaps not uncommon among men who promise to marry their muses after bedding them yet continue to cavort in nearby “pleasure gardens.”

Renk creatively reveals history through the burdensome and frustrated lives of two Victorian women artists, leading the reader gently down into the catacomb of St. Clement’s unaware of the heartbreaks to be revealed within their found diaries. The author’s writing is clear and easily understandable within each of three parts of her work; each diary entry is dated and labeled as to author, with occasional input from Maggie and her partner Bethany. Although the voices of the two women are virtually indistinguishable in diction, their lives seemed unlikely to intersect as they did.

Adding to the historical significance of The Rossetti Diaries, pictures of paintings by Dante Rossetti are included to raise awareness of the artwork produced during the period in which his sister, family, and preferred model Lizzie are memorialized.

Readers of historical fiction will especially appreciate another well-put-together novel by a woman immersed in British and women’s literature for nearly thirty years. Kathleen Williams Renk is also the author of the award-winning book Vindicated: A Life of Mary Shelley.