Taylor Swift, “your English teacher,” as she noted in her engagement announcement, channels the Victorian artists’ muse and poet Elizabeth Siddal in her new album Life of a Showgirl.
Swift is known for her deep knowledge of British literature, leading academics and enthusiastic students on a hunt for textual references in her songs. Siddal is today less known for her poems or her own considerable talent as a watercolorist than for being a beautiful model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters of the mid-to-late nineteenth century.
Swift alludes to Siddal’s most famous artistic representation in “The Fate of Ophelia,” the opening track in the new album. The painting shows Elizabeth Siddal lying back in a forest stream, arms raised in helplessness, waiting for the weight of her dress to pull her under. In what must have been one of the world’s most uncomfortable poses, she lay in a sodden dress in a bathtub full of cooling water for hours, over and over again, as the painter John Everett Mallais depicted her as the tragic Shakesperean character Ophelia, who had found love ( in Swift’s words) to be “a cold bed of scorpions” and committed suicide. Patience, a virtue much esteemed in