Dante’s Inferno 1967

Lizzie Siddal, Judith Paris, sits at the center of a stark opening as the exhumation of her desiccated body is shown, followed by a shot of Rossetti, Oliver Reed, dancing among the flames of Reynolds and Gainsborough paintings. A figure of the young Lizzie dressed as Joan of Arc rises above the blaze. Lizzie is seen modelling for Millais’ Ophelia and for a painting of Joan by Rossetti. The voice-over notes that she eats little and often throws it up, shaping a fragile, tormented bond between muse and artist that lasts for years. She and Rossetti spend several years together while he paints and draws her, but she spurns his advances, even slashing him with a needle when he presses himself on her. Rossetti turns to the more accommodating Fanny Cornforth, Pat Ashton.

Lizzie Siddal, Judith Paris, is introduced to laudanum by Emma Brown, Janet Deuters, to alleviate her stomach pain, and Christina Rossetti, Iza Teller, warns that Dante Gabriel needs a patron. Christina Rossetti brings a voice-over with her poem In an Artist’s Studio, speaking of Lizzie and her frailty, and Lizzie looks ill. Rossetti and Christina visit William Holman Hunt, who is painting The Light of the World. Hunt asks Rossetti to look after his girlfriend Annie Miller, Caroline Coon, while he travels to the Holy Land to paint The Scapegoat, but Rossetti engages in an affair with Annie and Hunt returns to a wounded dynamic.

John Ruskin, Clive Goodwin, visits Rossetti’s studio and shows a growing interest in Lizzie’s art. Rossetti then meets Edward Burne-Jones, Norman Dewhurst, and William Morris, Andrew Faulds, in Oxford, where they work on the Oxford Union murals and cross paths with the striking Jane Burden, who will become Jane Morris, Gala Mitchell. Jane marries Morris and Rossetti weds Lizzie. Lizzie becomes increasingly hysterical due to laudanum and Rossetti’s philandering, and she ultimately dies from an overdose. Rossetti buries his unpublished poems with her, a secret that haunts him for years.

Some years later, Charles Augustus Howell persuades him to dig the poems up, but Rossetti is relentlessly haunted by the image of the dead Lizzie and slides into a dependence on chloral. Fanny Cornforth rescues him from a suicide attempt, but Rossetti grows more and more obsessed with Morris’ wife Jane. He sleeps with Jane when Morris is away in Iceland, but Jane remains distant. Isolated, with only the loyal Fanny to care for him, Rossetti sinks further into addiction, and the story traces how a brilliant circle of artists and lovers navigates love, loyalty, and the fragility of genius within the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.