15 April 2015 15:32 PM
The blue plaque at 120 High Street Steyning recording the birth of Fanny Cornforth now needs to be updated. It reads:
Model, Companion, Nurse and
Friend to Dante Gabriel Rossetti,
Pre-Raphaelite Painter
was born here on
3rd January 1835
(date and place of death unknown)
Recently unearthed records reveal that she entered the Graylingwell Hospital asylum in Chichester in 1907 and died in 1909 at the age of 74, suffering from senile dementia. She was buried in Chichester Cemetery in a common grave without a headstone.
Cited as a supermodel of her time, the discovery about her final days was first made at the West Sussex Record Office in Chichester by Christopher Whittick, the biographer of Fanny Cornforth for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), and shortly afterwards by Kirsty Stonell Walker, the author of Stunner: The Fall and Rise of Fanny Cornforth.
Wendy Walker, County Archivist, West Sussex Record Office said: âArchives are full of hidden stories that are just waiting for the right person or the right set of circumstances to reveal their secrets.
âIn this instance it was the release of the indexes of the Lunacy Commission and Board of Control records by The National Archives in partnership with Ancestry that held the vital clue that sent two separate researchers to the West Sussex Record Office in pursuit of the last days and the final resting place of Fanny Cornforth.
âOnce in the Search Room, the Graylingwell Hospital case books revealed the truth that had laid hidden and tantalised researchers for over a hundred years.â
Picture: Fanny Cornforth.
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