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.
While ES
was working as a dressmaker in a milliner's shop, she came into contact with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
through a connection with the family of the principal of the London School of Design
...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edith Sitwell
ES
loved Christina Rossetti
from her childhood, and later thoroughly admired Gertrude Stein
. As a young woman, however, she believed: Women's poetry, with the exception of Sappho
. . . and Goblin MarketChristina Rossetti
and...
Textual Features
Edith Sitwell
The English edition appeared the following year. Her choice for inclusion is, as usual, idiosyncratic. She begins well before Chaucer
, with anonymous early religious poems in which may be heard, she writes, the creaking...
Occupation
Constance Smedley
In the New Forest they set up a theatrical summer school, which ran for three seasons. They attracted students from all over the world. At the same period they began publishing textbooks on their theatrical...
Textual Features
Henrietta Euphemia Tindal
She writes in many different metres, in diction tending to the old-fashioned. Many of her subjects deal in pathos, religion, or both. She imagines her daughter who died in childhood waiting for her In th'...
Literary responses
Charlotte Maria Tucker
The Athenæum's reviewer, George Walter Thornbury
, singled out The Shroud for comment. He found the book as a whole a pleasingly-written volume of religious verses, but with no claims to poetic insight. He...
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.
104-5
Tynan, Katharine. Shamrocks. Kegan Paul, Trench.
prelims
Yeats, W. B. Letters to Katharine Tynan. Editor McHugh, Roger, Clonmore and Reynolds.
In this first volume KT
establishes three themes that recur throughout her later poetry collections: religion, Ireland, and nature. The four monologues here are spoken by historical or legendary heroines: Louise de la Vallière...
Reception
Katharine Tynan
KT
later felt this was a very-much derived little volume.
Boyd, Ernest. Ireland’s Literary Renaissance. Grant Richards.
103
Her critics have observed the influence on it of the Pre-Raphaelite poets, especially Christina
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
.
Fallon, Ann Connerton. Katharine Tynan. Twayne.
37
Boyd, Ernest. Ireland’s Literary Renaissance. Grant Richards.
In his review for the Evening Herald, W. B. Yeats
judged that this volume was well nigh in all things a thoroughly Irish book, springing straight from the Celtic mind and pouring itself out...
Literary responses
Katharine Tynan
When Yeats's volume first came out he wrote to her: Now that Christina Rossetti
is dead [on 29 December 1894] you have no woman rival.
Hinkson, Pamela. “The Friendship of Yeats and Katharine Tynan, II: Later Days of the Irish Literary Movement”. The Fortnightly, No. 1043 n.s., pp. 323-36.
325
Publishing
Katharine Tynan
In 1906 KT
published two books in commemmoration of loved ones: A Book of Memory: The Birthday Book of the Blessed Dead and A Little Book for John O'Mahony
's Friends, written in memory...
Reception
Katharine Tynan
At the start of her writing career, in 1885, KT
was revered as the next Catholic
woman poet to succeed Christina Rossetti
. She herself held firmly to this image even while her Parnellism and...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sarah Tytler
Clearly delighted with the opportunity to mix in literary circles, ST
recorded her personal observations of these authors in Men and Women Met by the Way, the final 100-page-long section of her family autobiography...