Read our Privacy noticeAs a professor of pre-Raphaelite studies, I was excited to see that the track list for Taylor Swift’s 12th album, The Life of a Showgirl includes a song called The Fate of Ophelia. And the first song on the album, The Fate of Ophelia, references Siddal as well as Shakespeare’s tragic heroine. The song’s conceit is that a happy relationship has saved the singer from Ophelia’s fate of madness and drowning. The speaker in Swift’s song, however, has been saved from death: “You dug me out of my grave.”There are all kinds of interesting resurrection metaphors in the song: was Swift already dead, then? In isolation, Swift’s conflation of Siddal, Ophelia and her own persona isn’t necessarily that progressive: after all, the song features a woman waiting for someone to save her.