Fanny Cornforth
Crowdfunding a Memorial at her Last Resting Place

A Special Postscript by Emily Turner

A campaign was launched to fund a memorial at Chichester District Cemetery, where Fanny Cornforth was buried in an unmarked communal grave after her death at Graylingwell Asylum.

A rare photograph of Fanny Cornforth taken in 1863

After her life as a Pre-Raphaelite celebrity, Fanny Cornforth simply disappeared in 1906. Her friend and a collector of Rossetti's paintings, Samuel Bancroft Jr., attempted to find her. He was told that she had been taken to live in Hove, but this, as writer and researcher Kirsty Stonell Walker discovered, was not the case.

Kirsty, who is also Fanny's biographer, said: "Fanny had languished in third place as Rossetti's best known muse. She definitely lost out in terms of other people's interest to Lizzie Siddal and Jane Morris. That was part of the reason I wanted to research her. My book, Stunner, first published in 2006, was the first, and to date, only, biography into her life and I have done a pretty thorough job. There literally is not any of her life unaccounted for in some way or another. By the time I re-released Stunner, a few years back, I had amassed such a massive resource of her life and surrounding people that the only thing left was her death. We lost her in 1906 when Samuel Bancroft Jr. tried to find her on a visit to England and she had vanished. It was a real puzzle. In the back of Stunner I gave about three or more scenarios about what could have happened to her, including dying in obscurity under the name Hughes or Cox, because there were loads of Sarah Cox/Hughes [Fanny's maiden and first married names] who died in the beginning of the 20th century, but without any family registering or recording, she was just one of the many records I had collated."

After the National Archives publicly released the Lunacy Patients Admission Registers in early 2015, researchers discovered the last whereabouts of Fanny. Among these researchers was Kirsty, who, in 2015, discovered the story of the last days and final resting place of Fanny in the archives of Chichester's West Sussex Record Office.

Kirsty said: "What the breakthrough was down to was the marvellous connections I I had made over the 20 years I had researched Fanny. You end up meeting wonderful people (and some rotters!) and just such a person was the curator of Steyning Museum. When the lunacy records were released, a family member of the Cox family found Fanny's record and told Steyning. They then told me and I raced to Chichester's records office. The rest is history!"

What Kirsty found proved that Fanny had moved to lodgings in Bognor Regis but was placed in the care of the local workhouse when she eventually became too much for her landlady to deal with. From there she was taken immediately to Graylingwell Hospital, the West Sussex County Asylum, where she was admitted on March 30, 1907.

Fanny – by now referred to as Sarah Schott/Hughes – had become very deaf. She also had a bad temper, which, it was suggested at the time, was (unsurprisingly) a result of having been taken to the workhouse against her will.

Her first examination listed senile mania, confusion, and weak-mindedness, and she was said to be unable to sustain a rational conversation without memory loss and she suffered from sleeplessness. Despite her mental health being impaired, Fanny was said to be garrulous, but incoherent and very excitable.

After breaking her arm in September 1907, Fanny's health took a downward turn, and she became increasingly more unwell. She would rip bandages from her injured arm, and become confused. In 1908, she was again listed as having senile dementia. Fanny contracted bronchitis which developed into pneumonia, and she passed away at Graylingwell Hospital on February 24, 1909 at the age of 74 years old.

Fanny was buried in an unmarked paupers' grave in Chichester Cemetery.

Now the plot has been identified and a fundraising drive was launched to commission a fitting memorial to Fanny and all that she achieved in her life.

Sarah Rance-Riley, the project manager of the Graylingwell Heritage Project, said: "The discovery of Fanny Cornforth's last years and burial place happened during the final weeks of the GHP. Obviously, this caused lots of excitement, both for the project team and for the wider community – and the interest hasn't diminished since. I've had all sorts of people ask me about Fanny and where she's buried over the past year and after speaking with Kirsty, we thought the time was right to put a plan into action in order to properly memorialise Fanny. It really is heartbreaking to know that like others during that period, she was buried in an unmarked grave and essentially forgotten. We hope to remedy this and create a suitable space for people to pay their respects to Fanny in the coming years."