Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Christina Rossetti
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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.
The novel's central trope is mirrors, which function to explore identity, beauty, and the perception of oneself and others. Besides the Snow White tale, the novel remediates African folk tales about Anansi, who takes the...
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...
Textual Features
Emily Jane Pfeiffer
Literary biographer Kathleen Hickok
notes that the tale is full of oblique eroticism, fairy episodes, and Romantic imagery, with a realistic frame tale of female innocence, modern marriage, and disillusionment with eros, pleasure, and idleness...
Christina Rossetti
agreed to write on AR
, for a fee of £50, in John H. Ingram
's Eminent Women series, but in September she gave the project up, in despair about finding information.
Norton, Rictor. Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe. Leicester University Press.
4-5
Intertextuality and Influence
Adrienne Rich
First published in 1971 (Rich's collections often include writings issued previously), the essay When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision is described in 1988 by Elizabeth Meese
as still inform[ing] much of the best work...
Literary responses
A. Mary F. Robinson
Reviewers found in it a naiveté and artlessness which clearly pleased them. The Academy found the poems so natural sometimes with their faults and their freshness that they affect one like voices out of the...
DGR
's models as a painter included his sister Christina
(whose poem An Artist's Studio offers an interesting perspective on the project of the male artist), his companion painter, poet, and eventual wife Elizabeth Siddal
Intertextuality and Influence
Sappho
Elizabeth Moody
engagingly converts Sappho
into a contemporary in Sappho Burns her Books and Cultivates the Culinary Arts, 1798.
Jay, Peter, and Caroline Lewis. Sappho Through English Poetry. Anvil Press Poetry.
98
But many women poets accepted the notion of her rejected love for Phaon: Robinson
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.
199
Textual Features
Elizabeth Siddal
ES
's lyrics combine Christian and chivalric imagery, much of which can be found in other Pre-Raphaelites' work, with a directness of diction and address that gives her work considerable power. The simple but effective...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Siddal
ES
's best known work is the unfinished, powerful poem The Lust of the Eyes, which opens: I care not for my Lady's soul / Though I worship before her smile.
Marsh, Jan. Elizabeth Siddal, 1829-1862: Pre-Raphaelite Artist. The Ruskin Gallery.
34
It has...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Siddal
Christina Rossetti
declined to include six of ES
's poems posthumously in The Prince's Progress because they were almost too hopelessly sad for publication.
Marsh, Jan. The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal. Quartet Books.