Intro to A Broken Wing
‘Oh, we have all, when young, been in love with Miss Siddal’ - Charles Ricketts
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Elizabeth (Lizzie) Siddal, Pre-Raphaelite model, poet, and artist, was born in London in 1829. Discovered by Walter Deverell in 1849, she rose to the forefront of the Victorian creative scene in sitting as a model for Deverell’s Twelfth Night, Act II, Scene IV (1850). She is most well-known for her portraiture in Millais’s Ophelia(1851-2). Marrying Dante Gabriel Rossetti (for whom she is also considered a principal muse) in 1860, Siddal was consecrated at the heart of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Siddal also battled illness, psychological demons, and laudanum addiction throughout her life. She eventually died from overdose on the 11th January 1862.
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Curtains rise on a dim, cramped drawing room. Dust veils the surface of each furnishing, and the air feels stagnant, as if the curtains haven’t been opened for weeks. The room seems at once too manhandled, and too lonely. An emaciated armchair stands in the centre: an island among a sea of opened books, paintbrushes, and stained parchment littering the floor. Beneath a looking-glass upon a desk in the corner lies the sole glimmer of light: a teary candle, down to its last inch and flickering languidly, like one in whom the fight is nearly lost.
MISS SIDDAL enters, her hair loose and her creased blouse partly unbuttoned. She drags her feet as one who sleepwalks. Stumbling over the debris of crumpled papers, she collapses on the armchair, hands and feet wilting limply over its arm. Pause, for a moment, while she takes a few deep breaths and rubs her eyes.
MISS SIDDAL: Oh, the page is blank. Doubly blank, indeed. Too many empty spaces I cannot seem to fill. [sifting through the debris that buoys her and salvaging one wayward paper] See – empty! Overflowing with empty.
[After a pause, MISS SIDDAL cries out, anguished, crumpling the paper and throwing it a meagre matter of centimetres across the room. It floats, apathetic, in response to her outburst.]
MISS SIDDAL: I’m invisible – my step leaves no footprint. I think that perhaps one day I’ll just evaporate, bones dissolving – and just drift away weightlessly in a February breeze, without so much as whispering goodbye. [in a tone palpably lighter] I think that perhaps I’d like that. Living is gnawing away at my energy to live.
[She gazes down; vacant, wistful, dreamlike.]
MISS SIDDAL: What a waste of paper.
[Pause. Only the clock’s cresting throbs can be heard: a palpitating pulse beckoning the room toward hypnosis.]