Elizabeth Siddal is best known as the woman who floated in a freezing bathtub, lips turning blue, so John Everett Millais could paint Ophelia. This episode argues that history has done her a disservice by freezing her there. Born in 1829 to a working-class family that settled in Southwark and working in a millinery shop, she was discovered by painter Walter Deverell for her striking copper-red hair, a trait stigmatized in Victorian England but magnetic to the Pre-Raphaelite rebels.

We follow her transformation from model to artist: studying the painters’ techniques while she sat for them, becoming Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s student by 1852, signing her own work by 1853, and winning a 150-pound annual salary from critic John Ruskin, who called her a genius. Then comes the darker story: Rossetti’s possessiveness and infidelity, chronic illness treated with laudanum, a stillborn daughter, her death at 32, the burned suicide note, and the midnight exhumation of her grave to retrieve his poems.

• The butter-paper Tennyson story and a hunger for culture beyond her class
• How her 1854 self-portrait rejected the ethereal muse with heavy, opaque brushwork
• Rewriting medieval legends with women as active agents, as in her Clerk Saunders illustrations
• Laudanum, Victorian medicine, and why the coroner ruled her overdose accidental
• Charles Howell and the 1869 exhumation, and how the Tate and National Portrait Gallery are reassessing her today