Born on July 25th, 1829, Elizabeth Siddal was a multifaceted creative — a Renaissance woman trapped in the long shadow of Queen Victoria. In the field of painting, she enjoyed considerable success, acquiring the patronage of England’s foremost art critic, John Ruskin, who dubbed her genius, bought every single work at her first show, and paid her the staggering sum of £150 a year simply for the right of first refusal to purchase any art she produced. While painting was her vocation, she was also a skilled poet. She wrote, as inspiration struck, on scraps of paper and the backs of letters, but always revising and reworking. At the age of 32, her life and plans were cut short by a laudanum overdose before she had a chance to publish, or even prepare for publication, any of her work. Her surviving poetic output is small, amounting to only about 15 poems and some unfinished stanzas, but it is remarkable in its power and honesty, lacking the forced hyperbolic subject matter of many of her peers. In the months after her death, her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, toyed with the idea of publishing her poetry as a memorial and suggested to his sister, the well-known poet, Christina Rossetti, that they might appear as a section in her forthcoming book The Prince’s Progress. After reading Lizzie’s oeuvre, Christina balked, deciding that they were “too hopelessly sad” and suggested that if Dante really wanted to publish them he should include them in an upcoming volume of his (he never did). “I think with you that, between your volume and mine, their due post of honour is in yours. But do you not think that (at any rate except in your volume), beautiful as they are, they are almost too hopelessly sad for publication en masse. Perhaps this is merely my overstrained fancy, but their tone is to me even painfully despondent ....” And thus, without a champion, Lizzie’s poems entered into obscurity.

She is buried in Highgate Cemetery in London.

Make the book that you want to read. The poems presented here are collected from three tranches published by Elizabeth Siddal's brother-in-law, William Rossetti, in various biographies of his brother between 1995 and 1909. There have been other attempts to collect them in either scholarly or limited editions but never in an accessible, popular edition. This volume contains all 16 of her known, completed poems and an introduction by Kyle Cassidy with a gold inlaid debossed cover designed by M. C. Matz. This edition consists of 1862 numbered volumes and measures 4.15 x 5.8 inches of 42 pages in sewn signature. The goal of this book is to put Elizabeth's poetry into the hands of readers in the beautiful, period appropriate, edition the work deserved but was never realized during her lifetime. Other editions of Elizabeth's poems include Poems and Drawings of Elizabeth Siddal by Roger Lewis and Mark Samuels Lasner, published in 1997 in an edition of 500 -- copies of which go for nearly a thousand dollars now, Anne Woolley's academic publication "The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context", which came out in 2021, He and She and Angels Three is a pamphlet of a single poem published in 1979 by Eric and Joan Stevens, and Serena Trowbridge's My Ladys Soul, a scholarly text published in 2018 which looks at the original manuscripts currently housed in the Ashmolean museum at Oxford. Both this book and This is Only Earth My Dear were created with the help of crowdfunding backers who pre-ordered it during the summer of 2024. Look inside this book.

This is Only Earth, My Dear exists in the liminal spaces between worlds: between the modern world and the Victorian world, between the Victorian world and the Medieval world, between art and poetry, between forgotten and remembered, between creation and influence. The Pre-Raphaelites created castles where there were none and repurposed ones where they existed. They dreamt of a world that was long past and they dreamt it in a way that it had never existed. They put themselves on top of an imperfect memory and dreamed. And that’s what this book is about. It’s about how artists travel, putting layers of themselves and their experiences on top of the places that they go, and taking slices of that back with them to forever augment and temper the way they see the world in the future. We discovered the poetry of Elizabeth Siddal in the winter of 2023, in a biography about her husband and the effect was immediate: her words were powerful and heartfelt, eschewing much of the hyperbole common in her contemporaries. They were poems about things we immediately related to and this scant introduction sent us off searching for a volume of her complete oeuvre to take with us on a trip to London. Shockingly we discovered that there were no editions of her work and also that various versions on-line differed greatly in content, punctuation and spacing. We copied the poems down by hand from William Rossetti's biographies and read them extensively, repeatedly, until they began to permeate our experience -- realizing that modern London was haunted by the ghosts of the past -- as we stood in places that she certainly stood and looked out over vistas both changed and unchanged these words and feelings began to shape the photographs that we were taking until we were fully consumed, possessed, by her words. The photographs are not interpretations of Elizabeths poetry, rather they are the shadows of her words on our time in London. They are self-portraits written while someone whispered in our ears. Look inside this book.

This hand-made, hand-stitched zine contains all 16 of Elizabeth Siddal's known poems and eight of her drawings and paintings in two uncut sixteen page signatures, giving you the opportunity to have the victorian experience of cutting them yourself. The zines are perfect for carrying in a pocket or purse or for giving away.

Laurel Tree Press is a division of Laurel Tree Theater; producing works by, about, and benefiting women.