ABSTRACT
"It's a queer thing," muses a young woman in one of Rose Macaulay's novels, written shortly after the First World War, "how 'fallen' in the masculine means killed in the war, and in the feminine given over to a particular kind of vice." The chapter demonstrates that the fact that Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a poet as well as a painter, and dealt with the theme of the fallen woman in verse as well as in pictures, has little or no relevance to the major features of structure or expression—as opposed to the mere "story" or the iconographie details—of Found. If a woman has indeed figured as "Rossetti's icon for the artistic soul in the act of creation," then the figure of a woman could also be an image of his despair, his sense of the self—more specifically, the creative self—shut off from the possibility of help or redemption.
