Book review: Stunner: The Fall And Rise Of Fanny Cornforth

A portrait of Fanny Cornforth, which I saw at The Rossettis
exhibition at Tate Britain in 2023.

Last year I tried a new thing at the start of the year – I set myself a list of goals. They were relatively easy to achieve, and they were fun. Things like 'go to two exhibitions' and 'go to two gigs'. The aim was to stop myself from getting bogged down in the everyday, and to make sure I was actually doing things instead of wishing I could do things. It worked so well, I decided to set myself a new set of goals this year. One of 2026's is 'read two books on the Preraphaelites or their circle' as I've always found the art beautiful, and the dynamics of the group fascinating. With that in mind, I bought this book for my Kindle.

Two women loom large in the life of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Elizabeth Siddall and Jane Burden. (I'm using their maiden names, but Siddall married Rossetti and Burden married Rossetti's friend William Morris.) However, if you've ever read anything at all on the Preraphaelites you'll know Rossetti liked the ladies, to put it mildly. One who is present in his paintings, and formed a significant part of his life for decades, yet was disregarded, dismissed or outright disrespected in many ways by many of his associates and early biographers, was Fanny Cornforth. Stunner: The Fall And Rise Of Fanny Cornforth, by Kirsty Stonell Walker, undoes some of that neglect, revealing a girl born into poverty who became a great beauty, but – unlike Jane Burden, or fellow Preraphaelite model Annie Miller – never moved up in the social structure of Victorian England. 

Walker does a great job of finding the facts about Fanny, from her birth – which previous authors, focusing on Rossetti, usually got wrong, confusing her with her aunt – to her death, in a workhouse. (I find that particularly sad.) Like so many women in history, Fanny is seen more in what other people said about her, or even what they would not talk about, than in what she was given space to say for herself. What does emerge from her presence in letters to and from Rossetti and between his friends, is the sense of an easygoing woman, one who'd put up with an immense amount of 'artistic temperament' (to put it kindly) and genuinely cared for Rossetti, but who was also well aware of where she came from and to where she could easily return and so took great care to ensure her own financial stability. 

With so few of Fanny's own words to fall back on, it's impossible to get a clear picture, of course, but with meticulous research and respect for her subject Walker has re-established forgotten facts and put Fanny back in the frame. I also recommend reading Walker's blog, The Kissed Mouth, named after a famous painting for which Fanny was the model.