Rossetti in brief
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets of the 19th
Century, was born in December 1830, into a family of poets and artists. Devoutly
religious, she refused two offers of marriage because of religious differences. Much
of her poetry is religious, though she wrote some passionate love-poetry and much
which celebrates the joy of the natural world. She also wrote a book of rhymes for
very young children. She was close to her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and was
linked through him with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in art. After his death, she
lived a secluded life. She died of cancer in December 1894.
A resource from English Online [Link] @Actis Ltd 2001
Detailed biography
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)
Christina Rossetti was the youngest of four children of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian
patriot who came to London in 1824. Born on 5 December 1830, she had one sister,
Maria, and two brothers, Dante Gabriel and William. Christina and her sister were
mainly educated at home by their mother, and brought up as devout Anglo-Catholics.
Christina’s elder sister Maria eventually became an Anglican nun.
Rossetti’s brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, went to Kings College
School in London, and were founder members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
This group of artists, poets and critics approached art by studying nature in close
detail and by choosing subjects that they thought were morally uplifting. They chose
the name of their group to indicate that they thought all art since Raphael (an Italian
painter who lived from 1483 to 1520) was degenerate. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a
painter and poet. William later acted as Christina’s editor.
Although some of Christina Rossetti’s earliest verse was published in The Germ, a
magazine produced for a short time by the Pre-Raphaelites, and she sat as a model
for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings, she was not a member of the
movement. By modern standards, their poetry seems rich and cloying; hers is more
sensitive.
In sketches made by her brother Dante, the young Christina seems attractive. In
1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, a member of her brother’s Pre-
Raphaelite circle. However, she broke it off when he became a Roman Catholic.
Later, in her early thirties, she fell in love with Charles Cayley. Again she broke it off
because of religious differences. Her brother William later said; she enquired into his
creed and found he was not a Christian. Rossetti’s definition of Christianity was
narrower and more evangelical than most people’s.
Like many unmarried middle-class women of that period, Rossetti did not have any
paid employment, except for about a year when she and her mother tried to run a
day school after failing health and eyesight forced her father to retire in 1853.
However, she mixed with many celebrated artists and men of letters of her day, such
as Whistler, Swinburne, and the Reverend Charles Dodgson (author of Alice in
Wonderland under the name of Lewis Carroll) who were friends of her brothers.
Christina Rossetti’s religious views were so strong that she would only read
Swinburne’s long narrative poem Atalanta in Calydon after she had stuck strips of
paper over what she considered the anti-religious parts. After that she was able to
enjoy the poem very much. She continued to write poetry throughout her life, and in
the 1870s she worked on a voluntary basis for the Society for Promoting Christian
Knowledge.
Christina Rossetti’s family was very important to her. Although she loved two
different men, and it is clear from her poetry that she could express feelings of love
and the heartbreak of losing love, she never married or broke away from home. Her
brothers and sister were central to her emotions and she was deeply upset by Dante
Gabriel’s nervous breakdown in 1872. After he died in 1882, she lived as a recluse at
home, concentrating on her religious life. After a period of ill health Christina Rossetti
died of cancer on 29 December 1894.
A resource from English Online [Link] @Actis Ltd 2001
Much of Rossetti’s poetry was inspired by her religion. Many poems, such as When I
am Dead, My Dearest, Remember and Up-Hill, are concerned with the nearness of
death and the renunciation of earthly love. Her love of God is passionately expressed
in Long Barren, and her poem In the Bleak Mid-Winter is well known as a Christmas
carol. However, she is also a poet who demonstrates in her work a love of nature.
Another Spring and Spring Quiet show an exactness of observation which her Pre-
Raphaelite brothers would have undoubtedly appreciated.
Although she is thought of as a somewhat melancholy poet, and indeed much of her
writing can be sad, or even morbid by today’s standards, she can also express the
lighter side of life. Her poem A Birthday is a rapturous expression of delight in love.
She also shows a malicious appreciation of sisterly jealousies in her poem Two
Noble Sisters. Among her works is Sing-Song, A Nursery Rhyme Book, published in
1872, which contains lyrics for young children.
Many people consider that her best work is Goblin Market (1862), the longest of her
poems. Because goblins sound as if they belong in a fairy story, it is often put in
collections for young children. However, it is really a short epic poem for adults. The
most obvious quality of the writing is the exactness and sensuousness of her
descriptions of the fruit sold by the goblins. The nearest comparison in English
poetry to this must be the description of the feast in Keats’ The Eve of St Agnes. The
most striking thing about the subject matter is its eeriness. Two sisters, Lizzie and
Laura, see goblin merchants going to market with mouth-wateringly tempting fruit to
sell. Lizzie resists because she remembers the fate of Jeanie, another girl who
bought fruit from the goblins, but Laura buys the fruit with one of her golden curls.
When it is gone she pines for more, but can no longer hear the call of the goblins.
She sickens and nearly dies, but her sister braves the temptations of the fruit to bring
back juices which the goblins have squeezed onto her clothes in their efforts to force
her to eat. By offering herself in this way, she redeems her sister.
Some people have seen this poem as an allegory, in which the fruits offered by the
goblins stand for the pleasures of the world, though according to Christina’s brother
William she denied that it was anything more than ‘a fairy story’. However, many
modern readers may make a connection with the temptations and effects of narcotic
drugs. This may not be a connection that Rossetti intended, but the description of
Laura yielding to temptation and her subsequent illness would have been familiar to
such families as the Brontës, whose brother Branwell died of an addiction to drink
and drugs, and to Coleridge, who suffered from a lifelong addiction to opium. The
redemption of Laura by Lizzie’s self-sacrifice is one that fits well with Rossetti’s
devout Christianity.
A resource from English Online [Link] @Actis Ltd 2001
