The painting depicts a siren, a creature from classic Greek mythology, that also appear in tales such as Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Georgics.

"[3] The body is that of an unknown woman, however face of the drawing is that of model Alexa Wilding, with whom Rossetti drew and painted often and can be seen as the subject of many of his works at this time such as La Ghirlandata and Veronica Veronese.

It is an ornate delivery of one of Rossetti's obsessions: the femme fatale and his "lifelong exploration of the complex social and cultural significance of the (female) figure" and it was only published after his death by his brother William.

A poem "Death's Songsters" (1870) and a prose piece "The Orchard Pit" (1869) as well as his drawing Boatmen and Siren (1853) and his oil painting A Sea-Spell (1877).

[13] He also used this musicality to express a wider viewpoint and fascination with the physiognomy of his work, a way in which the beauty of the women he depicts reveal inner qualities or truths about them and this is extended to the instruments that he places within the compositions.

Rossetti recognized celestial associations with music and its means to lift everyday people from their boring lives into a spiritual one.

"[17] The brotherhood often criticized modern art as overly dramatic and "sloshy", which they defined as anything "lax or scamped in the process", they contributed these terms to a largely popular artist at the time Sir Joshua Reynolds whom they loving called 'Sir Sloshua'.

His later works were often criticized by fellow Pre-Raphaelite brothers as representative of Rossetti's own desires for the opposite sex, existing only as beauty without a purpose, pictures lacking any moral or valuable narrative.

[21] Rossetti stopped publicly exhibiting his work after a harsh criticism he received on a painting titled Ecce Ancilla Domini (1849–50).

[25] After bouncing around from a few people as debt payments, Ligeia Siren wasn't publicly known or seen after 1880 and did not resurface until a century later in 1973 where it was sold to a private collector by Christies.