ABSTRACT
A cult classic needs its quirkinesses. Sidonia the Sorceress is certainly, of all his works, the one in which Meinhold’s eccentricities and weaknesses are most in evidence. That these do not, however, include misogynism is shown by two facts: that the heroine of The Amber Witch is an absolutely admirable person, and that some of the men in Sidonia the Sorceress, including the witchfinder, are just as bad as Sidoma. Sidonia the Sorceress, Sidonia as sorceress, was also a part of that dream, in which Rossetti sought to escape from the constraints of Victorian materialism and morality. For those stifled by Victorian morality the book was like a blast of fresh air, its heroine the type of the Belle Dame sans Merci who looms so large in imaginative writing from Keats to Wilde and beyond. In effect a Pre-Raphaelite romance itself, it did to give to the Pre-Raphaehte cult of female beauty the dark dimension which is half its appeal.
