Tales of romantic and tragic love appear continuously throughout the Pre-Raphaelites’ works. From interpretations of celebrated early writers in English such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare to the fair damsels of John Keats’ poetry, fictional and historical figures were treated with a degree of realism, posed by family members or working-class models. The themes of love and desire explored by the artists often reveal Victorian conceptions of women and the socio-economic issues they faced during the period: poverty, prostitution and suicide.

Among these representations the most popular subject is the ‘fallen woman’—a woman who gave in to seduction, whose innocence is tainted and compromised. William Holman Hunt’s The awakening conscience depicts the fallen woman through a sympathetic lens by expressing her struggles, while John Everett Millais’ famous Ophelia pictures the tragic death of the heroine who was driven mad after her lover Hamlet murdered her father. The fragility of love and its association with emotions of loss, fear and disappointment also inspired artists such as Arthur Hughes and Philip Hermogenes Calderon.