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  ...