Per amore, la morte.

Ophelia, simbolo della fanciulla dimenticata.

The Lady of Shallot, simbolo della donna di transizione nella metà Ottocento.

The Pale Lady of Death

• J. Marsh, Pre-Raphaelite Women, Images of Femininity in Pre-Raphaelite Art, Londra, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1987

Ophelia , by Sir John Everett Millais, completed between 1851-52.

R. Barilli, I Preraffaelliti, Milano, Fratelli Fabbri Editore, 1967, p.16.

• "quell'ambiente paesaggistico, pur essendo 'fatto' in tutte le sue fronde e le sue erbe con minuziosa cura del particolare, o forse proprio per effetto di ciò, risulta promosso al rango di luogo ideale ed 'epifanico' per passeggiate meditative, in un perfetto equilibrio tra richiami sensuali (la giovinezza virginale della morta, il rigoglio primaverile della natura), e cariche spirituali nobilitanti."

Hunt, The Lady of Shalott, (vari dipinti tra il 1850 e il 1905)

Nina Auerbach, Woman and Demon, The Life of a Victorian Mith, Harvard University Press, 1982, p.11.

• “The Pre-Raphaelites painted her with obsessive, virtually incantatory repetition. ...Like Anderson's Little Mermaid, she assumed compelling life as a mysterious amalgam of imprisonment and power. This woman who appropriated the bard's function to make her own myth wove a spell over artists and readers that spread beyond her destiny in one particular poem or its source in Malory."

John William Waterhouse – I am half-sick of shadows, said the lady of shalott, ( 1915)

• No one has commented on what seems to me a curious fact, that in a poem about a Lady with a mirror, the traditional emblem of vanity, the Lady herself is never imagined in the mirror saying “this is I”. It is always the real world, outside the room, outside the lady’s self, which is reflected…. Selfhood is silent in The Lady of Shalott.

• Elaine Jordan, Alfred Tennyson, 1958, p.58-

• The Pre-Raphaelites painted her with obsessive, virtually incantatory repetition. ...Like Anderson's Little Mermaid, she assumed compelling life as a mysterious amalgam of imprisonment and power. This woman who appropriated the bard's function to make her own myth wove a spell over artists and readers that spread beyond her destiny in one particular poem or its source in Malory." Nina Auerbach, Women and the Demon, The Life of a Victorian Myth, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, (Mass.), 1982