the Poet in Grave: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lizzie Siddal, and Victorian Scandal of Stolen Poems

He buried his poems with his dead wife. Seven years later, he opened her grave to get them back.In 1862, Pre-Raphaelite muse, poet, and artist Elizabeth "Lizzie" Siddal died from an overdose at just thirty-two. Her husband, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, answered his grief with a magnificent sacrifice: he placed his unpublished poems in her coffin at Highgate Cemetery.Then ambition returned.In 1869, Rossetti authorized the reopening of Siddal's grave so the buried pages could be retrieved for publication. What followed became one of Victorian art history's most macabre legends: midnight digging, firelight, a strangely preserved corpse, impossible red hair, and a book rescued from decay.But how much of it actually happened?The Poet in the Grave separates documented fact from Gothic embellishment while restoring Siddal from tragic "muse" to creator in her own right. Witty, vivid, and meticulously researched, this is a true story of love, genius, guilt, reputation, and the extraordinary vanity required to change one's mind after burial.