The Works of Christina Rossetti

by Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti is widely regarded as the most considerable woman poet in England before the twentieth century. No reading of nineteenth century poetry can be complete without attention to this prolific and popular poet.

Rossetti's inner life dominates her poetry, exploring loss and unattainable hope. Her divine poems have a freshness and toughness of thought, while many of her love poems are erotic, and as often express love for women as for men. The varied threads of Rossetti's concerns are drawn together in what is perhaps her greatest poem, the strange and ambiguous 'Goblin Market'.

450 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1985

About the author

Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as "Up-hill" (1861).

Frances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

Dante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement.

When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.

All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer.

Reviews

[Sheryl · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was dismayed to realize this has none of her children's poems. "Who Has Seen the Wind?" is probably my favorite by Rossetti -- not here. "Horses of the Sea and Land" -- not here. "Hurt No Living Thing" -- not here. "What is Heavy?" -- not here. "January cold desolate" -- nope.

There's plenty here -- 450 pages of poems -- and I enjoyed a lot of it, but still feel a bit cheated. Rossetti could be cheerful or silly -- "Mix a Pancake" "When Fishes Set Umbrellas Up" -- but this collection is all grim and serious. And I love Rossetti's brief meditations on nature -- "Is the Moon Tired?" "What is Pink?" "If All Were Rain and Never Sun" -- which are also lacking.

"The Months: A Pageant" helps, but on the whole this collection feels relentlessly grim, which seems to me a disservice to the author. I'd hazard a guess there are more balanced offerings elsewhere.

[Warwick Stubbs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn't quite finish it, but it's a book that's been on the shelf intermittently read since last year, so I'm calling it a finished book for this year. Loved taking it down to the beach with me for a pleasurable and often soul-probing exploration of feelings often of feeling trapped, but still finding a sense of joy in life. I will continue to go back and read a verse every now and then to relive the pleasurable flow of Rosetti's writing.