Their personal lives were more or less the cliche of an artist's personal life. They had muses and one of those was the woman who posed for Ophelia, Elizabeth Siddal. She was 19 at the time and to get the portrait Millais had her lie in a bathtub, this would be for hours naturally and to keep the water from being getting cold he had lamps lit under it. He got so involved with the painting that they went out, so she sat for hours, fully dressed in a cold bathtub which, thinking about it, probably resulted in that authentic look of empty-eyed despair Ophelia's got going on. She got pretty sick as a result.
She went on to marry Rossetti, but theirs was not a happy marriage. Rossetti was a bit/a lot of a womanizer and she overdosed on laudanum at 32. When she was buried he had written her a book of poems and tucked it in her billowy copper hair, romantic right? Except a few years later when he was addicted to drugs and booze and short on cash he had her exhumed to take the book of poems back so that he could sell it.
One of the woman he cheated with (or at the very least had a "deep emotional relationship" with) was Jane Morris, if you ever google pre-Raphaelite art hers is the face you'll see (and Fanny Cornforth, they share a look):
Probably THE muse of the PRB. Jane was married to William Morris, who you can blame for the awful species of pattern that you could probably find in your grandmother's house:
If you could disassociate the pall of mass production from them they're pretty impressive. Morris was initially closely associated with the PRB but he went mainstream, with the best of intentions, wanting to democratize good taste and etc, the result being the complete ubiquity of his work swinging all the way round again to "bleh." There's probably a lesson there.
