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.
Most Victorian women writers commented in some way on the Queen's role. Christina Rossetti
engaged with it positively in Our Widowed Queen, while George Eliot
's narrator in Felix Holt, the Radical refers to...
Wisker, Alistair et al. “Introduction: A Literary Appreciation”. Doreen Wallace, 1897-1989: Writer and Social Campaigner, Edwin Mellen Press, p. xvii - xxi.
xviii
Textual Production
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
was by this time establishing a name for herself as an poet. In 1890 Elizabeth A. Sharp
included three of her poems in Women Poets of the Victorian Era. The anthology also features...
Reception
Rosamund Marriott Watson
RMW
's retirement from Sylvia's Journal did not hinder her growing literary reputation. In April 1894 she was featured (as Graham R. Tomson and with a flattering photograph) alongside E. Nesbit
, Christina Rossetti
,...
Textual Features
Rosamund Marriott Watson
Some of the fifteen poems chronicle the end of a love affair, perhaps foreshadowing her own marital crisis. Scholar Linda K. Hughes
notes the influence of Christina
and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
, Jean Ingelow
...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Webster
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...
Friends, Associates
Augusta Webster
Christina Rossetti
fondly recalled having had a courteous tilt in the strong-minded woman lists,
Rossetti, Christina. The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti. Editor Rossetti, William Michael, Haskell House.
97
referring to the unsuccessful overture AW
made to her, following the publication in pamphlet of Parliamentary Franchise for Women Ratepayers...
politics
Augusta Webster
Among those she courted for the cause was Christina Rossetti
, who wrote to AW
that [m]any who have thought more and done much more than myself share your views,— and yet they are not...
Intertextuality and Influence
Augusta Webster
The women speakers of Dramatic Studies include the imprisoned Jeanne d'Arc. By the Looking-Glass gives voice to a plain girl seated beside her bedroom mirror after she has arrived home from a ball. Skilled...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
Dramatic Studies as a whole was acclaimed by reviewers. A reviewer in the Westminster Review of October 1866 wrote that Mrs. Webster shows not only originality, but what is nearly as rare, trained intellect and...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
Both William Michael
and Christina Rossetti
greatly admired this play. William Michael called it the supreme thing amid the work of all British poetesses,
Rossetti, William Michael, and Augusta Webster. “Introductory Note”. Mother and Daughter, Macmillan, pp. 11-14.
13
and again so fine that I hardly discern where its...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
In the 1870s and 1880s AW
was mentioned in periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic—in Harper's and Scribner's, for instance, as well as in English publications—as one of the leading women poets of...
Literary responses
Augusta Webster
The first Dictionary of National Biography praised AW
's abilities as a poet and claimed a lasting place for her in the English poetic tradition, but by 1914 Watts-Dunton was complaining about her exclusion from...
Literary responses
Anna Wickham
Untermeyer
's introduction praised AW
's acid overtones of irony,
Untermeyer, Louis, and Anna Wickham. “Introduction”. The Contemplative Quarry; and, The Man with a Hammer, Harcourt, Brace and Company, p. vii - xv.
ix, x
and the unusual combination of lyricism and astringency in her work. It heralded her as the most typical and, in many ways, the...
Publishing
Ellen Wood
EW
, as Mrs. Henry Wood, edited her first issue of the sixpenny monthly The Argosy, which she had bought two months before. This first issue launched her new novel, Anne Hereford...