Desperate Romantics Episodes 2 & 3

I have now had a chance to watch the two episodes of Desperate Romantics that I missed while living out a Greek Idyll on the beautiful Island of Patmos. The reviews have been mixed, and some quite vicious, but the viewing figures for the series have been well over the 2 million mark, and mainly women, which is what I had thought it would be. The hits on our Possessed website have dramatically increased and July had the most traffic since we created the site. I have a feeling that this is something to do with the TV series!

However critical one could be about the series, it is exciting and does at least bring the PRB into the public awareness. One character I am really enjoying is that of Lizzie. While writing Possessed I had to restrain the character of Lizzie from taking over the show. The musical focuses on Jane Morris but Lizzie Siddal is one of the most extraordinary characters in the story and it is hard to turn the spotlight away from her. To some extent she used the brotherhood even more than they used her in the end, getting an artistic education from them and becoming an artist in her own right with patronage from Ruskin. Her poetry was rich with imagery... a Sylvia Plath of the 19th Century, with Rossetti her own Ted Hughes.