Dante's inferno, the private life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, poet and painter

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a cadre of artistic revolutionaries who flouted Victorian convention in both art and personal lifestyle. The leader of this movement was the anarchical poet/painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti whose profligate life is the theme of this freewheeling biography. The drama traces his courtship and eventual marriage to the frail and emotionally high-strung Elizabeth Siddal, his model for hundreds of idealized portraits and chaste fiancee for a decade. Following his wife's suicide from a laudanum overdose, Rossetti, overwhelmed by remorse, buried his poems with her, only to exhume them seven years later. After his shortlived affair with Janie Morris, wife of his Pre-Raphaelite confrere William Morris, Rossetti spent his declining years in decrepit isolation in his Chelsea home (complete with private zoo) addicted to drink and drugs. (Does not circulate)