Christina Rossetti

English poet

• Born: December 5, 1830
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: December 29, 1894
• Place of death: London, England

Rossetti’s verse, characterized by a richly sensuous expression of spiritual longings, and her technical skill in writing musical yet vigorous lines gave her a unique voice among Victorian poets.

Early Life

A lifelong Londoner, Christina Rossetti (roh-ZEHT-ee) was born in 1830 into an Anglo-Italian family. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, an expatriate Italian poet, had become a professor of Italian at King’s College, London. Her mother, Frances (née Polidori) Rossetti, a former governess, was the daughter of another Italian emigrant, Gaetano, and the sister of the John Polidori who had been Lord Byron’s physician.

By maintaining stronger ties with frequent Italian guests—patriots, writers, and musicians—than with proper English middle-class families, Christina’s parents gave her and her three older siblings an unconventional bilingual upbringing that encouraged artistic and intellectual pursuits. Christina’s father, an apostate Roman Catholic, left the children’s education and discipline to her mother, a fervent Anglican and a model Victorian wife. All four Rossetti children were precocious, producing illustrated stories and poems in their early years, with Christina and her older brother, Dante Gabriel, frequently competing in sonnet-writing contests. Christina and Gabriel are also said to have shared the most passionate or “Italian” temperament among the children.

A family crisis marked Christina’s entry into adolescence. Her father’s deteriorating eyesight and chronic bronchitis invalided him, seriously reducing the family income. Often delegated to stay at home as her father’s caretaker, Christina herself fell ill in the summer of 1845. She became weak, suffering chest pains, palpitations, and a feeling of suffocation. Because of the indefiniteness of diagnosis from her several reputable physicians, biographers have tended to interpret this malady as a nervous breakdown brought on by entering puberty. A few trips to the seashore partly restored Christina’s health, however. By 1847, she had written more than forty poems, which her grandfather Gaetano printed on his own press as Verses . Soon after this family publication, Christina followed her brother William into print in the Athenaeum, an important literary weekly, with two poems that Gabriel had urged her to submit. Thus at the age of seventeen, Christina publicly announced her calling as a poet.

Life’s Work

From a spirited, even unruly child Christina grew into a self-contained young woman aspiring to her sister Maria’s piety and sacrificing such worldly pleasures as chess, opera, and theater to Anglican High Church principles. Moreover, renunciation in the face of strong desire or attraction became an early theme in her poetry, as in her life. However, her letters reveal that her devoutness left intact both her sense of humor and her ambitions for her writing, which she worked on steadily all her life, except during times of serious illness.

Christina never chose to deny herself creative or intellectual sustenance—which in 1848 came to her through associating with members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, formed by Dante Gabriel, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais to challenge the old-fashioned academic art traditions of the day. The group’s other members included three less-well-known artists and William Rossetti. In addition to participating in the lively aesthetic discussions of the group when it met at the Rossetti home, Christina occasionally served as a model for the painters and offered suggestions for the group’s short-lived journal, The Germ. She also published seven lyrics in the journal. Her contributions to the first issue were unsigned; her contributions to the second and third issues were signed under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne.

The year 1848 also brough Christina a marriage proposal from James Collinson, a Brotherhood painter known to her previously from church. She initially refused his proposal because of his Roman Catholic tendencies but later gave him an ambivalent acceptance, contingent upon his return to the Anglican fold. The engagement lasted until 1850, when Christina gave up on Collinson after his formal conversion to Roman Catholicism. More than a decade later, she would reject another marriage proposal because of her religious qualms; on the latter occasion it would be Charles Bagot Cayley’s agnosticism.

As disciplined in familial as in religious matters, Christina joined her mother in teaching school in Somerset from 1851 to 1854 to improve the family’s financial situation. Even during a period of depression following her broken engagement, the failure of the Somerset school venture, and the deaths of two grandparents and her father, Christina continued to write and to have individual poems accepted by various magazines and anthologies. Although she was relieved that her poor health spared her from having to work as a governess, she sought a wider horizon in 1854 by volunteering to assist the nursing work of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War.

Christina was not quite twenty-four years at that time and she was rejected by Nightingale because of her youth. She then remained at home with her mother, her unmarried sister Maria, the family breadwinner William, and, eventually, two elderly aunts. Helping her mother run the household for two decades and then taking care of the older generation made Christina’s life emphatically domestic, but she was neither sheltered from reality nor reclusive. Although more constrained than Gabriel and William, she nevertheless visited relatives and friends in England, traveled to France and Italy, undertook parish duties, continued to frequent her brothers’ bohemian circles, took part in campaigns against child prostitution and vivisection, and did volunteer work at the St. Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women in Highgate. She socialized with—and won admiration from—such literary luminaries as Lewis Carroll, Robert Browning, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, and Algernon Swinburne.

In 1862, Christina joined the ranks of recognized writers with her first published book, Goblin Market, and Other Poems , which Gabriel illustrated for her. Both critics and readers greeted the book enthusiastically. This was a happy period for Christina, as the volume’s success coincided with her new engagement to Cayley. Four years later, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems (1866), also illustrated by Gabriel, appeared to similar acclaim and established her as one of the period’s foremost literati.

Middle age brought personal challenges in the midst of Christina’s professional success. Even as her elderly companions were beginning to need more of her care, she herself was diagnosed in 1871 with Graves’ disease, a deforming and enervating thyroid malfunction. When she and her mother felt compelled to find a new residence because of William’s marriage to Lucy Madox Brown, an atheist, in 1874, Maria also left, to join an Anglican sisterhood. During that same year, Christina published her first volume of devotional prose, Annus Domini , whose contents indicated her ever-increasing reliance on her religious faith for solace in adversity.

Before her death in 1894 from cancer, Christina saw into print a half-dozen other religious works and three collected editions of earlier poems, including the best-selling Verses of 1893. After being confined to her sickbed, she alternated between expressions of brave serenity and gloom about her fate. Toward the end, her nightly screams—perhaps from pain, perhaps from spiritual anguish—disturbed her closest neighbor. She finally died on December 29, 1894, at the age of sixty-four. After a funeral service that included the singing of one of her own poems, she was buried in Highgate Cemetery. Her only surviving sibling, William, supervised two posthumous anthologies of her verses.

Significance

A year before Christina Rossetti’s death, the Athenaeum extolled her as “one of the greatest of living poets,” while the Saturday Review similarly numbered her among “the foremost poets of the age.” As the writer of more than one thousand poems and eight books of prose, Rossetti was emphatically prolific. She also worked in an impressive range of genres: lyrical and narrative poems, children’s verse, nonsense rhymes, religious poetry, short stories for both adults and children, prayers and religious commentary, and even several poems composed in Italian. Equally impressive was her technical expertise, which led her contemporaries to rank her along Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Robert Browning. Two innovative hallmarks of Rossetti’s style that pleased critics were her simple yet resonant diction and her reliance on short, irregularly rhymed lines.

Rossetti became the most popular devotional writer of her day. Meanwhile, in poems combining spiritual themes with sensuously textured imagery in the tradition of Tennyson and John Keats, she announced her Pre-Raphaelite affinities—which in her Gothic masterpiece Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress found far more critical approbation than had previously greeted Pre-Raphaelite works by William Morris, Swinburne, and her brother Gabriel.

Finally, as one of only four major nineteenth century Anglo-American women poets, Christina contributed to a growing tradition of professional female authorship. Along with Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she confirmed the possibility of women’s genius in poetry. Like Barrett Browning before her, Christina Rossetti lived to see herself lauded for excellent craftsmanship in a jealously guarded masculine field and emulated by younger women.

Bibliography

Bellas, Ralph A. Christina Rossetti. Boston: Twayne, 1977. Overview of Rossetti’s career that devotes separate chapters to her juvenilia, two sonnet sequences, devotional poems, short stories, children’s verse, and religious prose.

Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. A chapter titled “The Aesthetics of Renunciation” is a feminist exploration of the prose narrative Maude and Goblin Market that links Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Emily Dickinson as voices of passionate renunciation.

Jones, Kathleen. Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti. Gloucestershire: Windrush Press, 1991. A feminist reading of Rossetti’s career, with emphasis on her friendships with other women and her affinities with such women writers as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, and Dora Greenwell. Includes photographs.

Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1994. Detailed biography by a leading Pre-Raphaelite scholar that includes close readings of Rossetti’s poems. Includes photographs.

Packer, Lona Mosk. Christina Rossetti. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Focuses on its subject’s emotional life and claims to solve many biographical conundrums by interpreting Rossetti’s relationship with William Bell Scott as a romantic one. Includes photographs and reproductions of portraits.

Thomas, Frances. Christina Rossetti. Hanley Swan, England: Self-Publishing Association, 1992. Relies heavily on Rossetti’s letters to her friends and information about her daily occupations to get to the complex person behind the saintly myth. Includes photographs of people and residences.