Lost and found: Textual and intertextual retrieval in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's exhumation letters and the 'Willowwood' sonnets

Plasa, Carl ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3819-4694 2024. Lost and found: Textual and intertextual retrieval in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's exhumation letters and the 'Willowwood' sonnets. Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 33 , pp. 190-225. 10.25623/conn033-plasa-1

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Abstract

This article is divided into two sections, the first of which is concerned with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s letters, written between 17 December 1868 and 26 October 1869, in which he considers the exhumation of the manuscript of his poems that he buried with his wife, Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, following her probable suicide in February 1862. While this macabre act of textual retrieval, carried out in Highgate Cemetery on 5 October 1869, is the most infamous incident in Rossetti’s biography and mid-Victorian literary history in general, the argument here is that its epistolary construction has not received due critical examination, just as Rossetti’s voluminous correspondence as a whole remains the least studied element of his intermedial œuvre. In its second section, the article turns the critical focus from Rossetti’s letters to his “Willowwood” sonnets, as first published in the Fortnightly Review on 1 March 1869, contending that this quartet of poems not only precedes the disinterment in a chronological sense but also contains several covert prefigurations of the episode, which it falls to the reader to uncrypt. Yet if the sonnets obliquely foreshadow the exhumation—and indeed are central to the very book (Poems [1870]) whose publication motivates the undertaking in the first place—they also have an ultimately more significant retrospective dimension, in the shape of their intertextual dialogue with John Keats’s “Isabella; or The Pot of Basil” (1820). As the article demonstrates, Rossetti’s turn to Keats’s text is neither random nor surprising since “Isabella” is itself marked by lurid scenes of burial and disinterment, loss and reclamation which would surely have resonated with the troubled artist-poet. What is surprising, however, is that “Isabella”’s presence in “Willowwood” has to date gone altogether unnoticed, despite the extensive critical debate which, in sharp contrast to Rossetti’s correspondence, the sonnets have provoked.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
ISSN:	0939-5482
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 September 2024
Date of Acceptance:	29 February 2024
Last Modified:	03 Sep 2024 09:01
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/167583

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