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Christina Rossetti

The information on this page is a biographical sketch for Christina Rossetti; offering the reader a basic knowledge of her life and work. There are some suggestions at the bottom of this page for resources and links that should help those looking for additional information.

Christina Georgina Rossetti: born December 5, 1830 at 38 Charlotte St., Portland Place London. (Bell, 5) Rossetti had breast cancer surgery in 1892 but the cancer returned and then late in 1894 she succumbed to the disease. Her death was on December 29, 1894 in Bloomsbury. (Flowers, xliii)

Father: Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti (1783-1854)
Italian poet who fled from Naples because of political reasons. "He became a leading teacher of Italian, and also Professor of Italian at King's College.
(Bell, 5)

Mother: Frances Mary Lavinia Rossetti [née Polidori] (1800-1886) The daughter of Gaetano Polidori an Italian exile. She is also the sister of the author of The Vampyre, John Polidori.
(Duguid, ODNB)

Siblings:

• Maria Francesca (1827-1876) "published a commentary on Dante."
  (Flowers, xxxiix)
  The title of the commentary is: The Shadow of Dante: Being an essay towards studying himself, his world, and his pilgrimage (pub. 1871).
  
• Gabriel Charles Dante (1828-1882) later he changed his name to Dante Gabriel. He was a poet and a painter.
  (Flowers, xxxiix)
  A founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood along with his brother, William.
• William Michael (1829-1919) "became a critic, a biographer and an editor of the poems and letters of his more celebrated siblings."
  (Flowers, xxxiix) A founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood that began in 1848. William was also the editor and poetry reviewer for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood's literary magazine entitled: The Germ.
  

Spouse: She never married but in 1848 became engaged to James Collinson, a young painter who had converted to Anglicanism for Rossetti. Two years after the engagment began he reverted to Catholicism and so he and Rossetti ended their engagement.
(Flowers, xli-xlii)

"In 1866, Rossetti received a proposal of marriage from a reclusive Dante scholar and former pupil of her father, Charles Bagot Cayley. To judge from a series of love poems written in Italian (Il Rosseggiar dell' Oriente), which William found in her writing desk after her death, Rossetti loved Cayley very deeply. But she refused him, perhaps on religious grounds, since he was a religious sceptic." (Flowers, xliii)

Children: none

Education: She received her education at home primarily from her mother.
(Bell, 13)

Christina's father reportedly always spoke Italian at home, therefore Christina became bilingual. Mackenzie Bell credits her exposure to the Italian language gave her a lyrical voice in her writings.
(Bell, 3-4)

Christina's education was heightened by reading Hone, Keats, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, the operatic poet Metastasio, et al.
(Bell, 13-4)

Influences:

"The poems of Rossetti's adolescence include many short lyrics with themes of love and death as well as monologues based on characters from the Gothic novels of one of her favourite authors, Charles Maturin. The preoccupation with death that emerges in her earlies poetry is in part a reflection of the Romantic literature of writers like Maturin and Keats, whose poems were among her favourites throughout her life. But this theme was also no doubt linked to the ill health she began suffering in 1845. Her brother William reported that the family feared for her life during her youth, and many of her early manuscripts are written in the hand of her sister. The cause of Rossetti's illness during this time is not entirely clear, encompassing heart trouble, fainting fits, andaemia, and what appears to be a kind of nervous exhaustion."
(Flowers, xxxix)

"The spiritual devotion evident in Rossetti's life and work was unusually intense even in an age noted for its religious preoccupations. Like many others of her generation, Rossetti was influenced by the Oxford Movement, which aimed to revive the High Church traditions of the Anglican church, moving it closer to Catholic observances and rituals. Rossetti was deeply interested in many of the saints, observed fast days, followed the liturgical calendar, wrote a number of devotional prose books under the auspices of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and lived an exemplary moral, almost nun-like existence, caring for her mother and aunts until late in her life. For many critics, this depth of devotion was a limiting factor, contributing, along with her ill health, to what they considered to be a 'morbid' strain in her poetry and constricting what might otherwise have been a string of Goblin Markets - richly imaginative, surprisingly sensual and innovative, informal verse."
(Flowers, xxxix)

"While Rossetti lived a relatively quiet, even pious, life, it would be wrong to imagine her as living apart from the literary and political influences of her time."
(Flowers, xli)

"The picture of Rossetti as a pious recluse must be counterbalanced by the fact that she remained close to her two brothers all of her life, one of them, William, a free-thinking atheist, and the other, Dante Gabriel, an artist whose life was at least as lurid as hers was chaste. That they were her most trusted critics points to a largeness of spirit not usually associated with a religiously restricted sensibility."
(Flowers, xli)

"In 1848, Rossetti's brothers, along witha number of other writers and painters, including William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, formed the 'Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood', which admired early Italian painting, with its attention to detail. They were critical of Raphael (and of the nineteenth-century academy painting it wa felt derived from him). The Pre-Raphaelites esposed fidelity to nature, creating works of art often characterized by implicit narratives and symbolic imagery. Rossetti, although a young woman and therefore excluded from the late-night meetings in Hunt's studio, nevertheless associated herself with their work."
(Flowers, xli)

Occupation/Publications: "Christina Rossetti had published a number of poems under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyn in the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood magazine The Germ, and in Mary Howitt's ladies' annuals and, more importantly, in The Athenaeum and Macmillan's Magazine. In 1862 her first collection, ‘Goblin Market’ and other Poems, ‘with two designs by D. G. Rossetti’, was published under her own name by Macmillan & Co. and was universally praised by reviewers as the herald of a new voice and an original talent. Sales, however, were disappointing. ‘The Prince's Progress’ and other Poems was published in 1866 and Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book, with illustrations by Arthur Hughes, in 1872. A Collected Poems was issued in 1875. All of these volumes had American editions and her reputation in the United States began to grow. After a sustained burst of creativity in the late 1850s, she mainly wrote occasional works, often donating poems to Christian charities such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the Anti-Vivisectionist League of which she was a passionate supporter. Her writing after 1866 was chiefly devotional: daily collects, scriptural commentaries, improving tales for children, and memorial poems. The exception to this tendency is found in her late sonnet sequence, Monna Innominata (1881), which is a romantic and part-secular imagining of the feelings of a ‘female troubadour’, the object of male devotion. Her attitude to her own work in her dealings with publishers and critics was quietly professional, though her correspondence with her publisher Alexander Macmillan, like her response to Gabriel's criticisms, was not at all subdued."
(Duguid, ODNB)

Style of Writing: "The emotion of Rossetti's lines is almost always in dialogue with a meaning on another level that is partially created through allusions. The enacted emotion may be one of despair, for example; but the despair may be worded so as to echo a Bible verse that offers a promise of hope. While we feel the speaker's present sorrow, we know, because the allusion reminds us, that there is another reality larger than the sorrow we are feeling. For example, the Proverbs verse 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick' (13:12) is echoed in at least sixteen of Rossetti's poems. On its face, the phrase 'hope deferred' alludes to disappointment and, perhaps, depression. But this phrase is shadowed by the second half of the verse, which Rossetti seldom quotes directly. The entire verse reads: 'Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.' The importance of this second half of the verse is emphasized by Rosstti's comment in Time Flies that '[w]e feel or fancy ourselves quite at home in the first clause of this proverb,' but that, left to herself, she might never have caught the meaning of the second until someone pointed out that the tree of life was the cross 'which satisfied the world's heartsick hope.' The 'someone' who pointed this out, of course, was her mother."
(Flowers, xl-xli)

"Her letters reveal her to be a witty woman with a teasing sense of humour. She wrote a number of poems based on contemporary political events and actively campaigned against cruelty to animals."
(Flowers, xli)

Works

Poetry:

• Goblin Market, and Other Poems (1862)
• Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866)
• Sing-Song: A Nursery-Rhyme Book (1872)
• A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
• Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885)
• The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (1892)
• Verses (1893)
• New Poems (1896)
• The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti. With Memoir and Notes & Comments. (1904)
• Selected Poems (1970)
• Complete Poems (1979)
• Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition (1986)

Prose:

• Commonplace and Other Short Stories (1870)
• Seek and Find (1879)
• Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals (1881)
• Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (1998)

Letters:

• Family Letters (1908)
• The Family Letters of Christina Rossetti (1969)
• Letters of Christina Rossetti: 1843-1873 (1997)
• Letters of Christina Rossetti: 1874-1881 (1999)

Best Known Work: Goblin Market

Publishers:

• Christina Rossetti was first published in the magazine the Athenaeum in 1848. Two years later in 1850 in The Germ under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne. The periodical was published by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of which both her brothers were founding members. William Rossetti was the editor and poetry reviewer.
• Alexander Macmillan

Religious and Political beliefs:

• Christina Rossetti was a staunch member of the Anglican church. She was deeply religious and because of her beliefs the two men that wanted to marry her were unacceptable because they were not Anglican.
• She detested all military aggression.
• Many scholars identify feminist themes within her poetry.
• She was against cruelty to animals and especially opposed to animal expermentation.
• She abhorred the exploitation of girls and their use in under-age prostitution.
  

Critical Response/Reputation: "Although her literary status was never as high as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's during her life, Christina Rossetti's posthumous reputation has remained strong and is increasing; she stands far above her popular, prolific contemporaries Dora Greenwell, Adelaide Proctor, and Jean Ingelow. In the twentieth century a great interest has been taken in Freudian interpretations of poems such as ‘Goblin Market’, and her work, which was previously admired for its innocence and artlessness, has become a hunting-ground for critics and biographers; enlisted as a symbol of repressed female genius, she has had her work scanned for tropes of starvation and sexual guilt. As with several other nineteenth-century women writers, notably Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson, the poetry seems more heroic when set in the context of what seems to the modern reader to be an unimaginably restricted life. In Christina Rossetti's case her pious scrupulousness seems at odds with the heartfelt emotion expressed in her poetry. Earlier admirers were anxious to promote her as a wholly Christian writer, as seen, for instance, in Mackenzie Bell's reverent Christina Rossetti (1898), William Michael Rossetti's congenitally careful ‘Memoir’ prefaced to his edition of her Poetical Works (1904), and Katharine Tynan's hagiographical ‘Santa Christina’ (1912). Later twentieth-century biographers, however, have tended to make more intimate moves and have sought to decode the writings in terms of a personal romantic disappointment. And so Lona Mosk Packer's 1963 biography puts forward the theory that the poetry was conceived around the poet's passionate, unrequited love for the painter William Bell Scott, a family friend. Georgina Battiscombe, in Christina Rossetti: a Divided Life (1981), presents her interpretation of a woman torn between religious observance and artistic rebellion. In her 1992 biography Frances Thomas suggests that her collapses were, in fact, periods of insanity whose recurrence she dreaded and which led to her circumscribed life. Most controversially, perhaps, Jan Marsh's Christina Rossetti: a Literary Biography (1994) presents her belief that the breakdown in 1845 and the strange imagery in some of the stories and poems was possibly due to sexual abuse by her father, when as a teenager she was left to look after him alone."
(Duguid, ODNB)

"Since the variorum edition of Christina Rossetti's Complete Poems appeared in 1979–90, a publication which made use of the manuscript notebooks in which the poems were copied, there have been dozens of reissues and reassessments which place her at the head of nineteenth-century women's writing, itself newly reassessed. . . . The growth of her reputation is well illustrated by her increased representation in anthologies of Victorian poetry published throughout the twentieth century. For instance, Arthur Quiller-Couch's Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912) contains twelve pages of her poetry; Christopher Ricks's New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1987) allots her twenty-three; and in the Penguin Book of Victorian Verse (1997) fifty-five pages are devoted to her work."
(Duguid, ODNB)

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