Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Christina Rossetti
-
Standard Name: Rossetti, Christina
Birth Name: Christina Georgina Rossetti
Pseudonym: C. G. R.
Pseudonym: Ellen Alleyne
Pseudonym: Calta
Nickname: Sister Christina
CR
wrote and published poetry ranging from religious poetry, love lyrics, and sonnets to narrative and dramatic verse. She published five successive volumes of verse, three collected editions, and many individual poems in anthologies and periodicals, from the 1840s until her death in the 1890s. She occupies a liminal position in relation to the Pre-Raphaelite
movement: deeply influenced by and indebted to it, she developed a voice and preoccupations in many respects distinct from those of its male members, partly because of her equally strong absorption in the High AnglicanOxford Movement. Goblin Market, the poem for which she is best known, has frequently been re-issued as a children's fable, but has also been convincingly read as a complex exploration of religion, gender, and sexuality. Some of her other verse was specifically aimed at children. Her attempts at prose fiction, of which a volume appeared in her lifetime and another posthumously, were not as well received as her poetry. CR
's devotional writing, which intensified towards the end of her life, includes hymns and other religious verse, as well as six volumes of religious commentary presented from a distinctively female standpoint. A writer who combined abiding interest in symbol and correspondence with stylistic austerity and metrical innovation that presaged modernism, CR
is recognised as one of the major poets of the Victorian period.
"Christina Rossetti" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Christina_Rossetti_2.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
Herstein, Sheila R. A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. Yale University Press, 1985.
97
death
Elizabeth Siddal
Rossetti engaged in memorializing his wife in a number of ways. He attempted to have her poetry published in one of his sister Christina
's volumes, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems.
Marsh, Jan. The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal. Quartet Books, 1989.
199
Dedications
Katharine Tynan
KT
's second poetry volume, Shamrocks (dedicated to William
and Christina Rossetti
), was said to be one of the earliest attempts to make use of Ossianic
material in Anglo-Irish poetry.
Boyd, Ernest. Ireland’s Literary Renaissance. Grant Richards, 1922.
Yeats, W. B. Letters to Katharine Tynan. McHugh, RogerEditor , Clonmore and Reynolds, 1953.
26-7, 29
Education
Mary Gawthorpe
Like all her siblings but one, MG
had been taught to read before she went to the local Church of England
infants' school, St Michael's, at the age of five.
Gawthorpe, Mary. Up Hill to Holloway. Traversity Press, 1962.
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Marsh, Jan. “Christian Rossetti’s Vocation: The Importance of Goblin Market”. Victorian Poetry, No. 3-4, pp. 233 - 48.
235
There is some dispute over their exact relation. In the notes to her collected poems, Rossetti
calls AEB
her cousin. Scholars John Sutherland and Jan Marsh
also refer...
Family and Intimate relationships
Ford Madox Ford
Christina Rossetti
was his aunt, and her brothers his uncles, through the marriage of William Michael Rossetti
.
Friends, Associates
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Beginning in 1854, BRP
and Barbara Leigh Smith participated in a society called the Portfolio Club in order to exhibit and share comment on their own and other women's artistic and literary creations. Other members...
Friends, Associates
Harriet Martineau
Anna Letitia Barbauld
visited HM
's mother from time to time. HM was impressed by the stamp of superiority on all she said.
Martineau, Harriet, and Gaby Weiner. Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography. Virago, 1983.
1: 302
Barbauld's niece Lucy Aikin
was another family friend. One acquaintance...
She made her entry into the city's literary circles with the assistance of Theodore Watts
, later Theodore Watts-Dunton, who was a great supporter of her work and later a colleague at the Athenæum...
Joseph Henry Parker
took over his uncle's Oxford bookselling and publishing business; as J. H. Parker
it soon became the foremost publisher of the Oxford or Tractarian Movement.
1897
With her publication of Grains of Sense, philosopher Victoria, Lady Welby
, shifted from theology towards a more academic and analytic study of meaning.