ford madox brown - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

year. The most arresting element of these two illustrations is the marked contrast
between the woman at the moment of and after her fall. The buxom woman in the
first illustration becomes a delicate, wan figure in the tailpiece matching the pathos of
the poem. The first illustration depicts the seducer roughly caressing a robust, young
woman in a rowing boat illustrating the lines from the first verse:
With love low-whispered 'twixt the shores,
With rippling laughters gay,
With white arms bared to ply the oars,
On last year's first of May.
In the tailpiece he portrays the moonlit conclusion:
Between Helmscote and Hurscote
A troth was given and riven;
From heart's trust grew one life to two.
Two lost lives cry to heaven. 129
Like Rossetti's words Brown highlights the redemptive quality of the woman's act of
suicide by depicting a thin Ophelia-like figure floating amidst water lilies, clutching
her baby. According to Lisa Nicoletti these images of female suicide adhere to 'the
iconographic expectations of Victorian audiences.' 130 Such images, which could be
found in newspapers, in magazines, and on the walls of the Royal Academy, exposed
129
The Dark Blue, vol. 2, October 1871, pp. 211-212. See appendix in which the poem is transcribed
in full.
130
Lisa Nicoletti, Resuscitating Ophelia: Images of Suicide and Suicidal Insanity in nineteenth-Century
England, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin, 1999, p. 170.
185