Product Description

The first full length biography of the muse and mistress of Pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, with details of previously unpublished letters, and recently identified portraits, and details of how this former prostitute assisted in the founding of one of America's foremost art collections.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1279433 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 144 pages

Customer Reviews

I loved this book
I have been studying the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti for years and this book shed new light on one of his most overlooked and dismissed models. Fanny Cornforth is often mentioned as an afterthought. Being the pitiable lower class prostitute and not a respectable Victorian lady, we are almost expected to look down on her (as most of Rossetti's biographers have done). I confess that I am guilty of a similar prejudice against Cornforth, being that I identify more with Rossetti's wife, to the point of having created a website devoted to her ([...]).
But I enjoyed this book a great deal. Kirsty Stonell Walker has humanized Fanny, shining light on her deep friendship with Rossetti. Fanny was many things. But this book shows that no matter what she was, she was a loyal and true friend to Rossetti. This is a must read for any Rossetti enthusiast and I encourage you to read it.

Sad that this is the first bio. . .
I would invite the casual reader, should she happen upon this text in passing, to open it at any page and then give herself ten seconds to find as many typographical errors, incorrect spellings of names, and examples of mangled syntax as she can. An intelligent middle-school student should find--even in that short interval--at least a couple of instances of anguished English.

I quote from the first page of the second chapter:

"The story is so unusual and remarkable that it has survived despite other more reasonable versions of the story which have president [sic] among Rossetti's usual way of soliciting models. . . . William Bell Scot [sic]. . . has another part to play later with his poem Rosabell, but it was in his Autobiographical Notes. . . that the myth of the nutshell springs, to be repeated ad nausium [sic] by Rossetti's biographers."

And that's only two paragraphs. Even if one ignores the idea of "springing myths," how can a serious reader do anything but throw the book containing such drivel away in disgust? If "nausia" is anything like the Latin "nausea," then that may actually have been what I was feeling as I closed the book and printed out a refund form as quickly as I could.

Whatever matter of substance may actually be included in this slim volume is buried in infelicities of style and spellings tethered to nothing in reality. Even a semicompetent proofreader might have helped.

If the option for zero stars were a possibility, this book would have received zero stars.