It was in 1849 when the Pre-Raphaelite redheads burst onto the scene with their first exhibit at the Royal Academy. No other group, no other movement, and no other revolution of any sort panegyrized and exploited historical typology of red hair as did the Pre-Raphaelites. They seemed obsessed with untidy, red-hair women as symbols for both resistance to conventionality and manifestation of otherworldliness. If the female redhead is seductive, the cajolery is an invitation to transcend into a mystical world where the mortal can only visit. Whether for good or evil or neither, the transcendence, even if temporal, in itself was and still is an invigorating respite from the degeneracy and imperfections of the modern world.

This chapter explores the typology of Pre-Raphaelite redheads as it was sometimes borrowed from history and tradition and at other times reinvented, rescued, and/or vilified but always reimbued with mystical qualities by the Pre-Raphaelites. Following that investigation will be a consideration of how the Pre-Raphaelite redheads influenced art, literature, and other media.

The Debut of the PRB Redhead

The first red-headed PRB woman appeared in John Everett Millais’ Isabella (1848–1849) who was depicted in an episode in Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1349–1353)Footnote 1 and was reintroduced through John Keats’ “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil” (1818).Footnote 2 Sitting next to Millais’ Isabella at a dinner table is her beloved Lorenzo who also has red hair. He hands her a blood orange, foreshadowing his own fate of decapitation and her death from a broken heart. In front of them is a plate with a beheading scene of either Judith and Holofernes or David and Goliath (Al-Joulan 2007, 260). Across from Isabella is her black-haired brother who kicked a red-haired greyhound that Isabella is now comforting. When the brother’s tilted chair returns to all four legs, it will crush the other red-haired greyhound asleep under it, symbolizing his and his brothers’ intent to kill Lorenzo out of jealousy and to force Isabella to marry a nobleman of their choosing. He is further contrasted with the virtuous Isabella, as Carol Jacobi (Tate’s curator) points out, by Millais’ strategic placement of a shadow of what appears to be his aroused penis. Jacobi argues that this and the phallic symbols in Millais’ The Bridesmaid (1851) were deliberate (2012, n.p.).Footnote 3

After the murder, Isabella exhumes Lorenzo’s body and lovingly cuts off his head. In the style of grandiose drama befitting an opera, she buries said head in a garden pot and grows basil in it because basil is known to transport the dead safely to God (Hajeski 2016, 19). Most of the redheads in Millais’ paintings do not do well (like The Martyr of Solway (1871Footnote 4)), but they are the virtuous ones who are either too good or too dangerous for this world and thus become immortalized in prose, poetry, art, drama, and music.Footnote 5

At that same exhibit, William Holman Hunt introduced Rienzi (1848–1849), with the full title being Rienzi Vowing to Obtain Justice for the Death of His Young Brother, Slain in a Skirmish Between the Colonna and the Orsini Factions, the subject taken from Edward Bulwer Lytton’s novel Rienzi, the Last of the Roman Tribunes (1835) about Cola di Rienzi (1313–1354).Footnote 6 Rienzi led a revolt to terminate the power of the Pope, reunify Italy, and restore the power of Rome (Lee 2018, 205–9). He considered himself to be “a tribune of the people” (quoted in Du Cerceau and Brumoy 1836 [1733], 32). In Hunt’s painting, Rienzi’s young brother, with his red hair, has been killed. Rienzi’s raised fist to heaven calls upon God to avenge the death and empower Rienzi to keep fighting the good fight.

The third Pre-Raphaelite painting at the exhibit was Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Girlhood of Virgin Mary (1849)Footnote 7 in which the Virgin Mary has red hair, and so does a small child angel who has brought seven books that represent the seven joys of Mary (a medieval devotional that included: “The Annunciation,” “The nativity of Jesus,” “The adoration of the Magi,” “The Resurrection of Christ,” “The Ascension of Christ to Heaven,” “The Pentecost,” and “The Coronation of the Virgin”). Rossetti’s mother was the model for St. Anne, the mother of Mary. His sister, seventeen-year-old Christina, modeled as Mary with red hair, although Christina’s natural color was dark brown.

Indisputably, the hair color of choice for the Pre-Raphaelites was red. Even Jesus gets red hair.Footnote 8 In the spirit of unconventionality for which they were famous, the Pre-Raphaelites subverted the stereotypical aversion to red hair. Prior to this lionization of redheads, ever since Judas was perceived to have had red hair and the Danish redheads invaded England, the “man with a red beard was held in contempt and regarded as vile with a cruel disposition” (Goodman 1943, 242); therefore, it is quite astounding that many of the Pre-Raphaelites gave Jesus the same color hair as their precursors gave to Judas,Footnote 9 but doing so did not go over well with everyone. When Thomas Carlyle saw Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–1853),Footnote 10 he called it a “mere papistical fantasy” and “an inanity, or a delusion to everyone that may look on it. It is a poor misshaped presentation of the noblest, the brotherliest, and the most heroic-minded Being that ever walked God’s earth” (355). With a “voice well-nigh to a scream,” Carlyle accused him of “repeating Judas’ betrayal to the high priests” (355). Additionally, “certain critics, unable to dissociate their conception of the Saviour from the conventional Raphaelesque time, condemned instantly as ‘the face of a Judas’” Hunt’s depiction of Jesus (Wood 1894, 146).

Many other critics were disinclined to regard the emergence of redheads as celebrities. Margaret Oliphant complained that many Victorian novelists, with the exception of Anthony Trollope, added erotica to their writing by creating red-haired women “exuberant in flesh and blood” (1867, 277). The “honest English girl[] we know,” Oliphant reassured her readers, is not “that disgusting witch with her red and amber hair” (277). To Oliphant, a novel, especially one with a heroine who has “glorious,” “red” and “dishevelled” hair, characterized the “low,” “sensational” novels with “fleshly” heroines (259), and she repined that “orthodox writers” use “a milder shade of colouring, auburn, and even chestnut (with gold reflections) in order to develop a concept but when a very high effect is intended, red is the hue par excellence” (269; emphasis in original). To the contrary, The Athenaeum was not impressed with Millais’ paintings because of their redheads. Listing Millais’ The Portrait of a Gentleman with His Grandchild (1849), The Child of the Regiment (1855), and The Blind Girl (1854–1856), with all three portraying children with red hair, the reviewer decried their “red-haired inflammatory atmosphere” as “very eccentric and unpleasing” (590).

The Pre-Raphaelites must not have been very successful in changing the public’s attitude about red hair. Victorian John Waddington tells a hilarious story in the Belgravia, written in the first person, of a shy man who has red hair. While returning home from work on the Underground, he overhears two women talking about a recent rendezvous with someone who has “Judas-colored hair.” Maggie explains that the hair was “that vivid, vegetable red that [she] always loathed and detested!” The narrator thinks, “Now, my hair is red, vegetable, vivid, vile, and detestable: of that colour with which only the invidious freckle loveth to abided” (1888, 344). By the end of the nineteenth century, people were still considering red hair to be the color of someone with a Judas disposition, and the prejudice did not wane. For instance, in 2010, Labour Party Harriet Harman called the chief secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, the “ginger rodent” (quoted in Barry 2010, 1304).

The Roots of Pre-Raphaelite Redheads

The two most famous Pre-Raphaelites who had red hair are Dante Gabriel Rossetti,Footnote 11 one of the cofounders of the PRB (Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood), and his lover/model/wife Elizabeth Siddall. If ever there were a couple that demonstrated the belief that there is some degree of truth in stereotypes, in particular, the stereotype of redheads’ having tempers as fiery as their hair color, then it was these two people. In Pre-Raphaelites at Home, Pamela Todd describes their volatile relationship in a chapter titled “The Dream Unfolds.” Todd begins with “If legend surrounds Gabriel, then Lizzie’s life is the stuff of fairytale.” But Lizzie did not end up with a “happily-ever-after” kind of love. Instead, her life turned into the grim stuff penned by the Brothers Grimm (2001, 37).

Siddall had nearly the same “flame-colored hair” as Charles Algernon Swinburne, one of her closest friends (Hawksley 175, 2004).Footnote 12 Walter Howell Deverell had asked her to pose as Viola in his Twelfth Night (1850). Through him, she was introduced to Gabriel Rossetti and then became his model. While working for Rossetti, she met Millais who then commissioned her to model as Ophelia in 1852, for “She was tall and slender, with red, coppery hair and bright consumptive complexion.”Footnote 13 Described as the color of “pale copper” (2) and “deep red” (Moyle 2009, 52), her hair was massive (52) as illustrated in Regina Cordium, Rossetti’s 1860 painting of Siddall he made on their wedding day. After Siddall’s death, Rossetti depicted her as the most famous redhead of all literature in Beata Beatrix (1864–1870).Footnote 14 Haunted by “the spectral image of Lizzie,” Rossetti resurrected her as Dante’s Beatrice (Moyle 272). In Beata Beatrix he has a dove (representing peace) bring her two poppies (the flower of death and of opium that would kill her).

Elizabeth’s love relationship with Rossetti was one of the most turbulent of all famous romances. Her last name was Siddall, but Rossetti changed it to “Siddal” in order to reflect “an elevated social status.”Footnote 15 The very act robbed her of her own ancestral name with erasure of her ancient lineage and resulted and evidenced “the instability of her identity” (Dunstan 2009, 26). An artist and poet in her own right, she wrote in “Fragment of a Ballad” that her lover “came to save me from pain and wrong” (11) though he was the very source that bent her “down to a living death” (16). It is noteworthy that Siddall titled her ballad as a “fragment” instead of an actual ballad, thus reflecting her own fragmentation; she saw herself as a broken individual. Constance Hassett reads this poem and other poems by Siddall where the heroine dies, as “Real, feigned, metaphorical, a woman’s dying is a richly symbolic way to explore life’s betrayals, losses, or paralyzing ambiguities” (1997, 455). She labels this poem as “an ambiguous critique of erotic victimization” (456) and disillusionment with heterosexual love (457).

In the murder mystery The Dreaming Damozel (1995)—taking its name from Rossetti’s painting (1875–1878)Footnote 16—by Mollie Hardwick, antique dealer Doran Fairweather finds a small replica of Rossetti and Siddall’s Ophelia and is later shocked when she comes upon a dead female in a pond who reminds her of Siddall (92, 158, and 259). Hardwick astutely captures Siddall’s “living death” captured in her pose for Ophelia for Millais:Footnote 17 She was “‘floating in that stream, singing snatches of old songs as she dies.’ ‘Not a stream, though. A bath in Millais’ studio, and the water heated by a lamp underneath—until wretched Millais went out and forgot, the lamp went out too. Lizzie in that heavily embroidered dress, lying there obediently and getting icier and icier. She got pneumonia” (25). It did happen that as she modeled in a tub for Millais, lamps beneath the tub were supposed to keep the water warm, but when the lamps went out, she did not want to disturb the painter’s work, so she just lay there as if she were indeed dead (Green 2014, 48; and Millais 144) and did catch pneumonia. Millais’ inattention to her well-being coupled with her self-sacrificial obedience nearly killed her. It is not much of a stretch to assume that Rossetti’s inattention was the cause of her nine-year illness that did finally end in death.

Siddall and Rossetti married in 1860 with a private ceremony, but Rossetti was unfaithful to her. She became addicted to laudanum and in 1861 gave birth to a stillborn daughter. On February 11, 1862, during her second pregnancy, she died of an overdose. A reviewer for Punch reported that Rossetti cried when he saw Siddall in one of his paintings and wrote, “The tears blind me, and I am fain to turn from the face of the mad girl to the natural loveliness that makes her dying beautiful.”Footnote 18

But that was not the end of the red-hair madness. As Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar interpret it, when Rossetti put a copy of his poetryFootnote 19 in Siddall’s coffin, his act signified that “woman and artwork were necessarily inseparable” (1984 [1979], 27). Charles Howell, an art dealer for Rossetti and Ruskin, as well as business manager for Swinburne, persuaded Rossetti to allow him to exhume the coffin to retrieve his poems. Later Howell told Rossetti that Siddall’s body was still perfect and that her hair had continued “to grow so long, so beautiful, so luxuriantly as to fill the coffin with gold!” (Doughty 1949, 417 and Moyle 303–7). Gilbert and Gubar consider her postmortem hair as “a metaphor for monstrous female sexual energies from the literal and figurative coffins in which her artist-husband enclosed her” (27). In their reading of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette, Gilbert and Gubar associate Howell’s claim with a scene in which Lucy buries all her love letters from Dr. John and then dreams of his hair growing out of “coffin-chinks.”Footnote 20 Dr. John has “long red hair” that he shakes “with a sort of triumph,” for he is proud of its “leonine hue” (Brontë 1853, 1.26). Both Lizzie Siddall and Lucy suffer from unrequited love (Lizzie is loved by Rossetti, but for nine years he refused to marry her), just as Rossetti suffered from his unrequited and idealized love for Beatrice (who also had red hair). With these three connections, then, perhaps the continued growth of hair and lively activity in and out of a coffin intimate that love can never die, especially when the object of desire has become immortalized in poetry, or in the case of Cathy and Heathcliff, or maybe some vampires, in a novel.

Perhaps they also intimate death in life, a form of madness, as signified by Siddall in the coffin and in the watery grave as Ophelia. Whether or not Shakespeare’s Ophelia committed suicide is not clear but likely. Her frustrated love for Hamlet, whose “noble mind is here o’erthrown”Footnote 21 drove her to madness. Siddall, as Ophelia, prefigures her own descent into madness that leads her to her suicide.Footnote 22 During her decline, Ford Madox Brown described her as “looking thinner and more deathlike and more beautiful and more ragged than ever.”Footnote 23

Even though Rossetti’s sister Christina was never fond of Siddall, she did recognize how self-centered the men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were in their vampire-like treatment of their models—red-haired and otherwise. In her famous “In the Artist’s Studio,” Christina concludes with “He feeds upon her face by day and night” (1896, 9). The object of the man’s desire does not live in her own right, “not as she is, but as she fills his dream” (14).

In Jeremy Green’s play Lizzie Siddal, Christina eulogizes her brother’s red-haired Beatrice and unrequited love. Rossetti supposedly saw Beatrice only twice (once when he was nine and once when passing her on the street and she did not salute him), and then he lived a “life full of yearning!” (2014, 1.2.15). Her refusal to acknowledge even his existence “broke his heart” (160)—Rossetti quoted this to Hunt who was visiting him at the time and replied with “The end.” Rossetti then said, “She had red hair” (16), as if that explained everything, such as why she was so alluring and why she was driving him to madness. Rossetti was also fond of Hunt, calling him “mad” and “the maniac” (Holman-Hunt 1969, 44), when the most noticeable physical quality of Hunt was his massive red beard.

Vampires and Red Hair

Bram Stoker, himself an Irish redhead, was inspired to write “The Secret of the Growing Gold” from the exhumation of Siddall’s coffin. Not only are there strong parallels between the story and the Rossetti/Siddall relationship to support this theory (Belford 1996, 294), there are the facts that Stoker was Rossetti’s neighbor and that Stoker’s good friend, Hall Caine, was living with Rossetti as his secretary.Footnote 24 Very likely Stoker heard that Rossetti authorized the disinterment and heard the rumors that followed about her hair filling the coffin. In Stoker’s story, a man—like Rossetti—is reluctantly persuaded to marry his mistress. Then he murders and buries her beneath the floor of his castle and marries again. Her hair continues to grow and breaks through the cracks (Stoker 1997 [1892], 142). The deceased’s brother finds the murderer, and he and the new wife stand before the brother; their “eyes were open and stared glassily at his feet,” which were “twined with tresses” of hair (144).

Stoker relies upon traditional Gothic conventions and “familiar motifs of confinement, repression, regression, and entrapment” of women before they are able to find power to escape and avenge themselves on their enslavers (Maunder 2007, 378). The growing hair, Andrew Maunder observes, “is linked in the masculine imagination with a fear of women’s sexuality” (378). The “vivid hair of the dead woman,” as Jerome McGann puts it, “is the continuing presence of the dead among the living” (52), but this is a phallocentric perspective. That her hair continues to grow signifies that she was, like Siddall, buried alive. David Skal deduces that Lizzie’s exhumation also inspired Stoker to have Lucy (in Dracula), with her “sunny ripples” of hair,Footnote 25 be buried in Hampstead Cemetery very similar to Highgate (where Siddall was buried).Footnote 26

In keeping with the Victorian practice of delineating characters with phrenological and physiognomic information, Dracula (1897) describes Dr. Van Helsing as if he were an ape (370) with a forehead that “ris[es] at first almost straight and then sloping back above two bumps or ridges wide apart; such a forehead that the reddish hair cannot possibly tumble over it, but falls naturally back and to the sides” (170; emphasis added). The doctor’s red hair contributes to his apish qualities, making him primitive—where “primitive” implies an inclination to believe in the supernatural—and diabolical (as signified by the red hair) in order to be a worthy and informed adversary of infernal forces like vampires. In pitching Dr. Van Helsing thusly, Stoker may have been reflecting himself. Mark Frost, in his neo-Gothic novel The List of Seven, describes Stoker as “a giant of a man” whose “leonine shock of red hair crowned his massive head and his face was framed by a thick red beard encrusted with icicles” (1993, 298).

Famous for his The Scream (1893), Edvard Munch, painted Love and Pain (Vampire) in 1895.Footnote 27 One cannot help but notice the woman’s long, unkempt red hair; it is the most prominent feature in the painting. Munch titled the work Love and Pain as the first to be in a series on vampires. When viewing it, his friend and critic, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, retitled it Vampire and said that it exhibited “a man who has become submissive, and on his neck a biting vampire’s face” (quoted in Russell n.p.). Peter Russell’s interpretation is that the redhead is definitely a femme fatale: “The lingering, pallid arm of the woman holding on to the man’s shoulders stresses the finality of her loving, yet killing hold” (n.p.).

In the early centuries throughout Europe, it was believed that people born with red hair were likely to turn into vampires because their hair was the same color as Judas’. In his 1623 The Spared Houres of a Souldier in His Travels or the True Marrowe of the French Tongue, John Wodroephe wrote: “It is believed in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Romania … that there are certain red [haired] vampires who are the children of Judus [sic], and that these, the foulest of the fowl, kill their victims with one bite or kiss which drains the blood if it were a single drought” (quoted in Cheung 2009, 49).

Montague Summers, in his The Vampire—His Kith and Kin, asserts that the same assumption was held in ancient Egypt. Red-haired men were called Typhonians because they were believed to be followers of Typhon, the horrific red-haired giant who was man from waist up, and serpentine below. He killed his brother, Osiris, the god of fertility, life, and death. In retaliation then, the male redheads were sacrificed to Osiris (1995 [1928], 182).

Lady Audley’s Pre-Raphaelite Look-Alikes

In the novel Lady Audley’s Secret, supposedly one of the Pre-Raphaelites painted Lady Audley, and the painting is the subject of speculation in Chapter 8:

No one but a pre-Raphaelite would have painted, hair by hair, those feathery masses of ringlets with every glimmer of gold, and every shadow of pale brown…. Her crimson dress, exaggerated like all the rest in this strange picture, hung about her in folds that looked like flames, her fair head peeping out of the lurid mass of colour, as if out of a raging furnace. Indeed, the crimson dress, the sunshine on the face, the red gold gleaming in the yellow hair, the ripe scarlet of the pouting lips. (Braddon 1862, 1:141–42)

She is the portrait of a “beautiful fiend.” To have painted such a hard and almost wicked look, the artist must have been schooled in copying “quaint mediaeval monstrosities” first (1:141–42).

Sophia Andres suggests that Mary Braddon was thinking of either Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (1850) or Edward Burne-Jones’ Sidonia von Bork (1860)Footnote 28 (2005, 1–2), with red-haired Fanny Cornforth as the model in both. The first title comes from the translated Italian proverb: “The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its good fortune: rather, it renews itself just as the moon does.” The proverb appears at the end of the seventh story of the second day in Boccaccio’s Decameron and reads (translated): “Lips for kissing forfeit no favour; nay, they renew as the moon doth over” (99). It refers to a daughter of the sultan of Babylon, Princess Alatiel, who, although she enjoyed sexual pleasures with eight men before marriage, is celebrated for her passion instead of scorned for being a maid no more (1866 [1349–1353], 85–99). Alatiel has been depicted with red hair by most painters, including Rossetti. Boccaccio does not describe her hair color, but his Decameron has several women with red hair, and Lauretta (1895), the female narrator of several of the stories, has been depicted with red hair by Jules Joseph Lefebvre (who had a penchant for painting redheads).

The story of Sidonia von Borcke has intrigued many artists and writers. She is one of the most famous femmes fatales in history. The title of William Meinhold’s two-volume novel about her, Sidonia, the Sorceress: The Supposed Destroyer of the Whole Reigning Ducal House of Pomerania (1847), iterates that red-haired women are no shrinking violets. The novel was translated into English (1849) by Jane Elgee Wilde, Oscar Wilde’s mother. It was published by and illustrated by Pre-Raphaelite William Morris in his Kelmscott Press. Briefly, she was born in 1548 to a wealthy noble family and grew up to be independent. She constantly challenged the men in her family and community with lawsuits. In short, she made a lot of enemies. Patrick Bridgwater describes her as “proud, crotchety, choleric” and “given to swearing like a peasant when her ire was roused” (2013, 371–72).

During mass, she and a sub-prioress got into a heated argument, and the latter accused her of witchcraft and of having consulted with a gypsy fortunate teller named Wolde Albrechts (Riedl 2004, 142–43). Albrechts was then charged with maleficium and Teufelsbuhlschaft (having sex with the devil) (143–45). Under torture she accused Sidonia of witchcraft. With seventy-two charges against her, including being accused of murdering countless men and also having sex with the devil, she was tortured and executed with unspeakable cruelty (138–49).

The Penguin edition of Lady Audley’s Secret features Gabriel Rossetti’s 1866 Monna Vanna on the cover.Footnote 29 Monna Vanna is a play by Maurice Maeterlinck written in 1902 and was made into an incomplete opera by Sergei Rachmanioff (1908). It is a fifteenth-century story about a conflict between Pisa and Florence. General Prinzivalle offers to cease the siege on Pisa if he gets to spend one night with the beautiful Giovanna (Monna Vanna), the wife of Guido Colonna, the commander of Pisa. Guido is so possessive of his wife though that he is willing to sacrifice his city rather than give up his wife for one night. Vanna takes matters into her own hands and goes to Prinzivalle. Her only dress is a mantle or cloak, as requested by Prinzivalle, which means she is naked underneath and implies that he intends to have sexual intercourse with her. This aspect was so shocking to George Alexander Redford, the London Deputy Examiner of Plays, that he banned the play and forbade its public performance in London. Philip Comyns Carr produced a private showing later in 1902, which found such favor for its merits and morality that Thomas Hardy, George Meredith,Footnote 30 and Swinburne criticized the censorship in The Times (Sova 2004, 185). How amazing it is that the same play could garner such polarized reactions, but its plait is formed by the duplicitous strands of a woman’s red hair that is both beautiful and beguiling, which, presumably from a male’s point of view, evokes both love and hate, and salvation and damnation all at the same time, all by the same woman.

Prinzivalle was an honorable man, but he fell in love with Vanna at an earlier meeting. He did not intend to violate her and did not. He must have known by demanding that she come to him in the nude, covered only by a cloak, that he was provoking a marital and political crisis even though he did not plan to debauch her. He assured her that if ten thousand women were to enter his tent dressed in the same mantle, he would recognize her as the most beautiful of them all (Maeterlinck 83): “You came in, and I saw the brow again that I knew so well, the hair, and the eyes; I saw the soul in the face I adored” (84). The effect that she had on him when he first saw her iterates the stereotypical good/evil power that red-haired women had on men. He declared, “I knew I was lost, I had the wild craving to drag all things down with me…. And I hated you because of this love of mine! I marvel now at myself when I think of it…. There needed but a word that was not yours, a gesture different from your gestures, to unchain the brute within me and fan my hatred…. But the moment I saw you I realised how impossible it was.” (97).

When Vanna returned the next day, she was unable to convince her husband that Prinzivalle did not have sex with her. Prinzivalle was so honorable, he accompanied Vanna to protect her from repercussions by her husband and his people, thus putting himself in danger. In addition, since he disobeyed his superiors by not taking Pisa, he was now considered a traitor to his own people. Obviously, he would go to any length to acquire Vanna as his own. Believing that Vanna led Prinzivalle to him, Guido compared Vanna to Judith who killed Holofernes (124).Footnote 31 Realizing that her husband intended to kill Prinzivalle, she begged for his life and professed her love for Guido’s enemy. By doing this, she sealed his fate and therefore quickly confessed that she lied to Guido about her adulterous love, that it was all a ruse in order to entice Prinzivalle to return with her so that he could be captured. Guido was assuaged, and the play ends as duplicitously as it has run throughout. Vanna is given the key to Prinzivalle’s prison because Guido thinks she has won the right to kill the man. She says, “I want it for myself alone. So that I may be quite sure, and that no one else … Yes, it has been a bad dream … but the beautiful one will begin. The beautiful one will begin” (143). The reader does not know if she will kill him to save herself or kill him and then herself, or to arrange for his and her escape. She is a redhead, so how are we to know what was her or our or their bad dream and what was the beautiful dream? Either way or both, the red-haired woman is in control of all the battle-hardened men around her.

“Monna Vanna” translates as “vain woman.” Since Vanna acts like a humble woman in Maeterlinck’s play, to consider her “vain” and as “woman” is to give her a phallocentric viewing, that she is the woman whose beauty, like that of Helen of Troy, “launched a thousand ships” or drove men to madness and swords.Footnote 32

Before Rossetti’s painting, the first Monna Vanna was made as a charcoal supposedly by Leonardo da VinciFootnote 33 and is owned by the Musée Condé. The same picture is in color with some embellishments made by Salaì, is called Donna Nuda, and hangs at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. A similar painting in color, called Monna Vanna, is at the Louvre. Because of their similarities to Mona Lisa, they are each called the Nude Mona Lisa. All three women in the paintings have red hair. Salaì had curly red hair, and da Vinci, later known as the “ginger genius,” was mocked for his red hair during his time (Thorpe 2019). In the fifteenth century in Italy, red hair for men was considered freakish, and no more freakish than da Vinci who besides having red hair or because of having red hair, was left-handed and had a reputation as being a sodomite (Thorpe).Footnote 34

Similarly, the Victorians prioritized exterior, physical characteristics as indices to personality and behavior, with “the physiognomies of the characters being intrinsically linked to their ‘real’ inner selves” (Puri 2009, 35). Of all physical elements, “hair is a more nebulous category that exists in a liminal zone between the body natural and the body social” (36). Granted, Monna Vanna’s hair may be more yellowish than red, but the red in its goldness puts it into the category of flaming red hair. However, there is a distinction that can and should be made between how the Victorians perceived golden versus red hair: The Victorians were fascinated with blonde hair; the more golden it was, the more it negatively connoted wealth (gold) and female sexuality (Gitter 1984, 936). This attention to physical details about women especially regarding hair color that typifies much of Victorian literature was not just codification of women’s interiority; it was especially prominent in sensational and Gothic novels. The focus of female physicality “was the source of their perceived transgression,” says Lyn Pykett (1992, 99). Such physicality makes the woman an object of desire; it compels the reader to join in the act of “spectatorship,” and furthermore, “bewitches” other characters, “intoxicates the narrator,” (100) and by extension, bewitches and intoxicates the reader. Is this a form of powerlessness or of power?

With tongue in cheek, Margaret Oliphant credits Braddon for being the “inventor of the fair-haired demon of modern fiction” (1867, 263). A reviewer for The North British Review complains that Braddon’s attempt to create a “female Mephistopheles” in Lady Audley fails because no woman can “fill such a part” of being “timid, gentle, innocent” and at the same time have “the nerves of a Lady Macbeth who is half unsexed” (“Lady Audley’s Secret” 1865, 186). Turning to Braddon’s John Marchmont’s Legacy (1862–1863), the same reviewer, chuckling, admits that Braddon “has taken great pains” in developing Olivia as a character. He or she supports this statement with: “As far as we can gather, the only reason why Olivia was not madly in love with her cousin was that his locks were red, and hers black.” Olivia was “weary of life,” but the reviewer observes that Braddon does not explain her state of mind or the “sad secret” that made her weary, but instead focuses on her hair: “It had not that purple lustre, nor yet that wandering glimmer of red gold, which gives peculiar beauty to some raven tresses…. It was dark, fathomless, inscrutable, like herself” (194). Then the reviewer tracks various examples of both sets of hair, noting that “Circumstances alter hair as well as cases, for example, ‘When married to the girl Olivia detests, he is said to have had ‘chestnut curls’” (194). So focused on “the shape of their noses and the colour of their eyes and hair,” Braddon has created characters who would be of little interest to us if they were not criminals (202–3).

Lydia Gwilt and Red Hair

Arguably the most notorious femme fatale in all Victorian literature is Lydia Gwilt in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale (1864–1866). When Armadale first meets her, he stands “like a man petrified” because of her “horrid red hair” (141). Her hair is described elsewhere as with “the lustre of her terrible red hair [that] showed itself unshrinking in a plaited coronet above her forehead” (182). “Superbly luxuriant in its growth,” Collins, as Galia Ofek relates, was familiar with the Pre-Raphaelites through his father and brother when “burning auburn” “became a hallmark of the Pre-Raphaelite style” (207).

Gwilt has “magnetic sexual power,” which seems to reside in her red hair, “to ensnare and entrap” men (Ofek 2016, 208). Her hair “becomes an obvious marker of illicit, fatal and burning sexuality which indeed scorches all the male characters in Armadale” (208). Ofek interprets the red with its associations with Gwilt’s spilling of blood and considers her to be a “‘flesh-and-blood’ heroine rather than a spiritual angel” (208). Hers is a “flaming, smouldering sexuality” (208).

Daphne du Maurier’s Neo-Gothic and Red Hair

Continuing the Gothic tradition of the haunted and haunting redheads, Daphne du Maurier wrote Rebecca (1938), which has long been compared to Jane Eyre, with the presence of a missing wife haunting the new mistress of the house. Strangely, in Alfred Hitchcock’s first movie and the first film adaptation of the novel, Joan Fontaine plays the second wife, and three years later, she plays Jane in Jane Eyre.Footnote 35 Although hair is mentioned sixty-two times in the novel and Rebecca’s hair was dark, we are not told the color of the Second Mrs. de Winter’s hair, but the 2013 edition by Little, Brown has a red-haired woman on the cover. Her hair is so prominent that you cannot see her face. Jack Favell, the promiscuous cousin to Rebecca who was having a sexual relationship with her, has “reddish hair” (Du Maurier 1938, 148). When he first meets the Second Mrs. de Winter, he asks, “Like being buried down here”? (150), a significant question in that the First Mrs. de Winter had been shot and then “buried” in her sailboat, which was deliberately sunk to hide her remains. The housekeeper tries to drive the second wife to insanity and to commit suicide and is very nearly successful.

The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë is a less-known work by du Maurier. Although the three Brontë sisters had brown hair, Branwell had the same tawny hair as did his father (1961, 39), not unique to the Irish. That said, stereotypically, du Maurier claims that Branwell was not a Yorkshireman: “He belonged, by blood [(and by hair)] and temperament, to that first feckless group from across the water which might beckon him … to the great company of gifted, wasted Irishmen who, in their mother country, are content to fail and dream, but transplanted to another, break in body and soul” (164).

According to du Maurier, Branwell had a photographic memory and was not only ambidextrous, being able to write two different letters simultaneously with both hands (38–39), but also “far too nervous for school” (39) and “the excitability of his nature would be misunderstood”; he seemed unable to “distinguish between dream and nightmare,” and he had “nerve tremors” (50), so his father taught him at home.

Branwell seems himself deader than the dead. Du Maurier has him looking out of the parsonage window to the cemetery below on January 13, 1837 (92), when he writes a poem that begins with “Poorer mourner—sleep” (2015 [1845], 1). The mourner cannot sleep, and he cannot weep (1–4). The dead “only desecrate the ground” (35),Verse

Verse And voices sweet as musics thrill, And laughter light as marriage strain Will only wake a ghostly chill As if the buried spoke again. (37–40)

But Branwell is “dying away in dull decay” (45); he is “cast”Verse

Verse From hope and peace and power and pride A withered leaf on autumn’s blast— A scattered wreck on ocean’s tide! (49–52)

Then Emily wrote in Wuthering Heights Lockwood’s observation that Mrs. Heathcliff was “being buried alive” (2003 [1847], 33). Branwell wrote another poem (“At Dead of Midnight, Drearily”) that may have given Emily her idea to write about Lockwood’s attempt to stop the branch of a fir tree from wrapping against the window and grasps instead “the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand!” It is Catherine Linton who is begging to be let in out of the cold and dark (E. Brontë 42–43). Branwell wrote about Harriet’s ghost—her “wandering spirit” (B. Brontë 1999 [1838], 267)—that cries out,Verse

Verse Leave me not in the dark! Tis cold And something stands beside my bed— Oh loos[e] me from its Icy hold. (303–5)

Kate Bush’s “Wuthering Heights” song, with her dance interpretation in red dress and bright red hair (on YouTube), comes to mind with her lyrics that repeat throughout the song:Verse

Verse Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy I’ve come home, I’m so cold. Let me in through your window.Footnote

Bush was only nineteen when she wrote and performed this song. It hit the number one UK Singles Chart for four weeks in 1978 (Thomson 2010, n.p.).

Close to the end of Branwell’s life, he appears at the Black Bull: “A head appeared. It was a mass of red, unkempt, uncut hair, wildly floating around a great, gaunt forehead; the cheeks yellow and hallow, the mouth fallen, the thin white lips not trembling but shaking, the sunken eyes, once small, now glaring with the light of madness” (du Maurier 262). He believed that he had been called to murder Robinson there; “it was a call from Satan” (263). “He described himself as waiting anxiously for death—indeed, longing for it,” a friend of his relates (263). His father wrote: “There is also delirium tremens brought on sometimes by intoxication—the patient thinks himself haunted by demons, sees luminous substances in his imagination, has frequent trembling of the limbs, if intoxication be left off this madness will in general diminish” (quoted in du Maurier 265).

The Woman, aka, Whore and Red Hair

The story of the Pre-Raphaelites and their passions about red hair is resurrected in John Fowles’ famous French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), a novel that qualifies as a neo-Gothic work. Constantly ascribed with characteristics of a Pre-Raphaelite model like Siddall, Sarah Woodruff has noticeably red hair (175, 318) and is often referred to as the “whore.” Unlike Siddall, Sarah is quite the seductress. She deliberately and systematically bewitches Charles Smithton, so much so that he becomes obsessed with her; yet, she is still a virgin. Portrayed by Meryl Streep in Harold Pinter’s script, Sarah has brilliant red hair that refuses to be restrained. Clearly both Fowles’ character in the novel and Streep on the screen often turn their heads as if striking a pose, as if they are modeling for a pre-Raphaelite (Mainon and Ursini 2007, 338). At the end of the movie is a nearly static scene, like a framed picture, when she and Smithson are in a boat on a placid lake, what Sara Martín Alegre describes as “a postcard that is not only pre-Raphaelite but also Romantic” (2014, 59).Footnote 37 Furthermore, the hints given in Chapter 60 indicate that Sarah is living with Dante Gabriel Rossetti.Footnote 38

Daphne: A Plait of Red Hair

A biofiction by Justine Picardie, Daphne is a multi-strand plait of numerous people who are connected in some way to the madness of red-haired Branwell Brontë. They include:

Daphne du Maurier (1907–1989; but the story takes place from 1957 to 1960, when she is working on The Infernal World of Branwell Brontë), her grandfather George du Maurier (1834–1896; Punch cartoonist, author of Trilby, and good friend to Henry James), Sir Gerald Hubert Edward Busson du Maurier (1873–1934; actor and stage manager who often performed with Gertrude Lawrence and played the first George Darling/Captain Hook in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan), herself (1907–1989), Rebecca (eponymous character of du Maurier’s bestselling novel first published in 1938), J. Alex Symington (1887–1961; famous bibliographer and coeditor of the Shakespeare Head Edition of The Poems of Charlotte and Patrick Branwell Brontë), Branwell Brontë (1817–1848), and a young woman who is writing her dissertation on du Maurier, Branwell, and Symington, who does not get a name; in “Acknowledgements,” du Maurier simply calls her “the contemporary narrator” (403).

Picardie’s plot is driven by two major research efforts: du Maurier and Symington who aim to rebrand Branwell as a literary genius and the contemporary narrator and her husband’s ex-wife who are delving into du Maurier’s and Symington’s research on Branwell. All other characters in the novel have some experience with these players (du Maurier, Symington, contemporary narrator, Rachel, and Branwell). Branwell, with his red hair, is an agent of resistance and subversion of sexual mores and conventional behavior, with all characters following suit and ending in a cauldron of despair. In the researchers’ efforts to produce biographical information, as well as their accomplices who offer their advice about the biographical research, all of them insert their own psychological angsts into the construction of the biographical subject while they infuse the psychological angst of the biographical subject into their own lives. As I argued and demonstrated in my Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft (2017), biographies are never “impartial; they bend according to their author’s psychological makeup, cultural encoding, historical agency and political penchants” (1).

The novel foregrounds Daphne’s production of her biography on Branwell. In 1957 she is enjoying the fame and fortune from Rebecca (1938) and My Cousin Rachel (1951), both of which were turned into successful plays and award-winning films.Footnote 39 While researching Branwell, she is also experiencing acute mental distress. Her husband, Sir Frederick Author Montague “Boy” Browning, whom she calls Tommy, had been a highly decorated officer in both World Wars. In the 1950s he is serving as the treasurer in the Office of the Duke of Edinburgh, but he is also having an affair and suffering through several nervous breakdowns. In the novel Daphne feels as if she is the second Mrs. de Winter from her novel Rebecca and is haunted by the ghost of Rebecca, until she becomes Rebecca herself, possessing a husband who means to murder her (14). Daphne herself had had several affairs, including an incestual relationship with her father (220–23) and a lesbian relationship with Gertie Lawrence (14), but Tommy’s infidelity hits her hard, especially since he continues to depend upon Daphne for his financial keep and personal healthcare.

In writing about Branwell, du Maurier discounts that he ever had an affair with Mrs. Robinson. Branwell had difficulty separating fact from fiction, projecting himself as “a Byronic hero like Northangerland, rather than a lonely parson’s son” and hoping that he could marry the wealthy Mrs. Robinson who could financially support him for the rest of his life, allowing him to live a life of leisure. In this, he reminds Daphne of Tommy who is dependent upon her (58).

As for Mr. Symington, his reputation was tainted by his association with Thomas James Wise, notorious for his literary forgeries and theft of documents from the British Library. However, Symington, like du Maurier, both in Daphne and in real life, wanted to give credit to Branwell if not for the merit of his own poetry, then for his influence on Emily’s writing of Wuthering Heights. A few of Branwell’s letters note that he was working on a novel. Was it Wuthering Heights? Or did he write a novel that could be found and now posthumously published? (59). Symington’s mental and physical heath drastically decline and lead to his death as he tries to recover Branwell’s reputation.

Irrelohe (1919) is an opera written by Franz Schreker that links red hair with madness. The setting is the castle of Irrelohe during the eighteenth century, home to Count Heinrich whose family of redheads have been under a curse that has compelled its dukes to rape and then die insane. When the count is getting married, his brother sees Eva and “her red hair turns his head (and perhaps even his hair) red. … Red hair thus provokes madness and signifies that madness once provoked” (Daub 2013, 186). The opera makes a point that this form of madness, with its roots being in red hair, is hereditary, so does the stereotype that red hair causes madness seem to be socially hereditary, as exemplified further in Picardie’s novel. Her three major characters, the graduate student, Symington, and du Maurier seemed to be obsessed with Branwell, and Branwell’s red-hair madness is driving them mad.

Picardie assumes that a color grinder who worked for a painter in his unpublished manuscript The Wool Is Rising is Branwell’s “romanticized alter ego” (1999 [1834], 249). The description follows and is reproduced just as he wrote it with strange punctuation: “This grinder was a fellow of singular aspect he was a Lad of perhaps 17. years of age but from his appearance he seemed at least half a score years older and his meagre freckled visage and. large Roman nose thatched by a thick. Matt of red hair constantly. changed. and. twisted themselves into an endless variety of incomprehensible movements” (B. Brontë, 60). In introducing the red-haired Harriet O Connor, “a handsome Girl” (1999 [1834], 153) in The Life of Alexander Percy, Vol 2, he surely was also painting a portrait of himself. Beneath “the surface of her character” was a “complete freedom from pride”: “Underneath … lay a heart filled with strong impressions a mind overgrown with eradicable errors habits of constant thinking which always ended in thinking wrongly. But also and mark the folly of judging intirly [sic] from outward appearances feelings always stretched and far too often troubled and restless and melancholy. I am convinced that her mind was of the highest order but rendered useless through want of training to be right” (154). Whether naturally rebellious, neurotic, or delusional from substance abuse or all three, Branwell’s writings are full of resistance to reality, sexual mores, and social as well as familial expectations; they are very dark.

Two years into her research and writing, Daphne tries to “set Branwell aside” and be free of him (as she would like to be free of Tommy), but she feels “wedded in some way, as inextricably linked as she was to Tommy.” If she does not tell Branwell’s story, “he would haunt her, sending her round and round in circles, until she was altogether lost, with no sense of how to find her way out again” (Picardie 219).

Through her research and correspondence with Symington, du Maurier feels as though she “was going mad, driven mad by Branwell, as much as by Tommy” with the hope that Branwell could rescue her from Rebecca, but feared that the both of them “would consume her” (130–31). She is also weighed down because of Tommy’s breakdowns and his mistress who blames Daphne for the breakdowns. Daphne decides “to write her way out of the mess that she was in, by turning Branwell’s chaotic life into a beautifully composed biography” (162).

The contemporary narrator has her own mental crises. A young doctoral candidate, she is working on her dissertation on Daphne’s research on Branwell. Like du Maurier and Symington, she is in a troubled marriage. She married one of her professors at Cambridge University too soon after he was divorced by a wife who was also an English professor. Twice her age, Paul is a Henry James scholar who pressures her to write on James and not du Maurier because he considers du Maurier a low-brow, popular writer (36–37). Like Branwell and Daphne, she has trouble separating the “reality” inside literary fictive worlds from her own reality. She fell in love with Paul because he was “Heathcliff and Mr Rochester and Maxim de Winter” in that she “had been waiting for them to step out of the pages of the books [she] loved; when [she] knew them so well, read them inside out and into [herself]” (38).

Symington is losing his identity to Branwell. With “a weak heart,” Symington has a fall. When his wife finally returns home and finds him, he is dispatched to a hospital. Once convalescing at home and told that he may no longer cart his boxes of letters and documents concerning the Brontës from the attic (for the purpose of selling some to Daphne, and others to help him write his own biography on Branwell), he seems to be haunted by Branwell’s ghost: “Occasionally, Symington had a momentary pang of guilt, thinking of Branwell’s fate in the attic, shut away from the gaze of the world, and sometimes he woke in the night, his heart pounding, certain that he heard shuffling footsteps in the corridor outside the bedroom, or a low moaning noise, or getting closer, right at the door” (201).

The characters’ lives intersect in ways other than their research on Branwell that causes them to grow muddled in their own self-identity. The contemporary narrator—the nameless wife of Paul—celebrates her anniversary with her husband with a trip to Fowey, within walking distance to du Maurier’s house, Menabilly (when Daphne was alive). She learns that Paul was there before with his first wife, Rachel (304–13). Then the nameless wife of Paul and the first wife of Paul become entangled in each other’s research on du Maurier and Branwell and Symington, while Paul thinks he is experiencing déjà vu. His second marriage fails (353–62).

Daphne goes to Symington’s home near Haworth, but Symington, having lost a sense of his own identity, pretends that he is Mr. Morrison, Symington’s assistant (338–46). She is determined to persevere with the “hope that Branwell’s story would emerge from the paper that surrounded her” (317). Suddenly she has a vision of sorts, of someone coming to Fowery to research her just as she was researching Branwell (347).

When Daphne first began her research on Branwell, she

pictured a pen moving across a page; Branwell’s hand, writing his Angrian chronicles, feverish and furious, shut away in an airless room on a sultry afternoon, when the thunder and the rain was pent up behind the clouds, and he was waiting, waiting to escape out into the world. Or was there no escape from the imaginary world that he conceived for himself and his sisters, the fantastical landscape they called “the infernal world”? … Daphne imagined reaching out and taking Branwell’s pen from him and writing him into life on the page; the red-headed boy who burnt out in that infernal world, reincarnated in her brilliant book, her best yet; to match the best of Charlotte and Emily’s work, to match Branwell, too, for in proving him to be a lost genius, she would also prove herself. (20)

By the end of Picardie’s novel, Daphne concludes that Branwell was no genius and was too much like Tommy, “drinking too much and thrashing around in life, lurching from crisis to crisis, weeping like a little boy when it all got too much for him” (316).

She has finished the biography. She has donated all her manuscripts by and about Branwell to the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Before Symington died, he sent his notebook about all his research, but it was so damp and mildewed that she could not read it. The book came with a note from him that said, “‘Self-Interrogation’: Do with this what you will” (398). It was “a wordless book in the woodless woods” (398). Daphne puts down her pen and leaves her writing hut, and the novel ends (399).

From Boudica to Victoria

In AD 60, a Celtic queen and her husband Prasutagus ruled the Iceni in today’s East Anglia. The Roman historian Cassius Dio described Boudica (or Buduica) “very tall, in appearance most terrifying, in the glance of her eye most fierce, and her voice was harsh” (8.62.2). She also had “the tawniest hair” down to her hip but translated elsewhere as “a great mass of red hair.”Footnote 40 To keep peace with Rome, Prasutagus willed half of his property to go to the Roman Emperor Nero (who murdered his mother the year before) and the other to his daughters, but at his death, the Roman Procurator Decianus Catus demanded all of it. When Boudica protested, he had her stripped naked and publicly flogged and her daughters raped. He not only set on fire a woman wronged by the men who ruled over her, he ignited the ire of a redhead.

She led a fierce revolt that killed 70,000–80,000 Romans. Besides her own red hair, she led 120,000 Celts (Dio 8.62.2) who had “flowing fair or reddish hair” (Fraser 1989, 47) to the Roman capital in Briton called Camulodunum (currently Colchester that now has a stained-glass image of her with red hair in Moot Hall or the townhall). Next, she led an army of 230,000 men (Dio 8.62.8). When the Romans retaliated and captured her, legend has that she and her daughters took poison rather than be taken captive. It is interesting that the monk Gildas in the sixth century called Boudica “the treacherous lioness” and her followers “crafty foxes,” when both animals are known for their red hair (Gildas 540, 21).

Her name from the Gaelic comes from the word bouda or “victory” “Boudīcā” is translated as “Victoria” (Webster 1978, 15). Impressed by Thomas Thornycroft’s statue of Queen Victoria on a horse, exhibited at the Great Exhibition in 1851, Prince Albert encouraged him to commemorate Queen Victoria as a modern-day Boudica by sculpting a bronze statue of Boudica and her daughters, which now stands on the north side of the western end of Westminster Bridge facing Big Ben and Westminster, “as if she was defending the very embodiment of the kind of Establishment she tried so hard to destroy” (14).

Contemporary painter Howard David Johnson, in the style of the Pre-Raphaelites, depicts many scenes from Celtic legends including several that focus on Boudica. His Celtic warriors have red hair, but even though he has one Boudica with flaming red hair, another (Celtic Queen Boudica and the Morrigu) has auburn, and still another has very blonde hair. His Helen of Troy, Valkyrie Maiden, Goddess Andraste, The Angel of Prophecy, Modern Sermiramis, and Amazons: Warrior Women of History, however, definitely have red hair. Two other contemporary artists have given Boudica red hair, namely R. E. Groves and Herbert Norris.Footnote 41

The reason that I am ending with a reference to Boudica is an attempt to unravel the plaits of disparate groups of redheads covered in this chapter. Whether male or female, whether human or supernatural, whether now or then, and whether blessed or cursed, redheads have been invested with more than pheomelanin. Most portrayals of female redheads seem to have been made by men who have perceived them to be powerful entities that either pose a threat to men in the tradition of Circe and Medusa or else suggest a supernatural or spiritual superiority that can bewitch them and rob them of their potency. Most portrayals of male redheads seem to be equally possessed of strong abilities to deceive, betray, or generally cause trouble for other humans. Whichever strand that makes up a plait of red hair, it has never been regarded as natural. The color of red has been traditionally the color of power, and those who are redheads, draw and exert their power from their hair, just as the biblical Samson did.