Lizzie's Hair - February 1862 - University of Delaware Online Exhibition of Lock of Hair with Rossetti's Note

 "Beautiful deep-red hair that fell in soft heavy wings" -  Georgiana Burne Jones on Elizabeth Siddal's hair.   

DG Rossetti Regina Cordium 1860
 Lizzie's Wedding portrait - Wikimedia Commons

Elizabeth Siddal Plaiting her Hair- DG Rossetti 
- CC-NY-NC-ND 3.0 unported
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artwork-n04629

Following Lizzie's sad death from a laudanum overdose on 11th February, 1862 , Rossetti was distraught.  Grieving he clipped a lock of  the "dear" copper  hair , he had sketched and painted profusely, and placed it in a folded sheet of paper marked" Lizzie's hair February 1862".

To assuage his feelings of guilt, he placed the only manuscript of his unpublished poetry alongside her in the coffin.  Lizzie was  reportedly pregnant at the time of her death. Seven years later in 1869 , regretting his previous impulse,  Rossetti arranged the notorious exhumation of his late wife's remains at Highgate cemetery  to retrieve his poetry.  According to reports of those present at the exhumation, Lizzie's gleaming hair had grown and filled the coffin  adding to the myth of Elizabeth Siddal.  No wonder then , that her hair is described as iconic and possibly “ the most famous hair of the 19th century”.

After Rossetti's death, his niece gave the lock of Lizzie's hair to an American scholar. It is now at the University of Delaware . Lizzie's lock of hair, and Rossetti's handwritten note can be viewed in the online exhibition  from the Victorian Passions collection at  the University of Delaware:

  https://exhibitions.lib.udel.edu/victorian-passions/exhibition-item/lock-of-elizabeth-siddalls-hair-with-attached-autograph-note-by-d-g-rossetti/

For further background on the discovery of the lock:  https://www.udel.edu/udaily/2019/october/lizzie-siddal-pre-raphaelite-muse-winterthur-lock-hair-art-history/