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.

Connections

Connections Sort descending Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Violet Hunt
Friends of VH 's family included John Ruskin , Edward Burne-Jones , John Millais , Dante Gabriel Rossetti , Robert Browning , and Christina Rossetti , who read Violet's early poems. VH also met and...
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 Adelaide Procter
AP 's parents entertained a circle of well-known literary personages, including Leigh Hunt , William Hazlitt , Thomas Moore , Wordsworth , Tennyson , Longfellow , and Henry James . Intimates of the household included...
Friends, Associates Jean Ingelow
JI met Christina Rossetti , with whom she and Dora Greenwell came to share a unique literary and personal friendship.
Rossetti, Christina. The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Editor Harrison, Antony H., University Press of Virginia.
190, 203
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...
Friends, Associates Adelaide Procter
Other intimate feminist friends of AP 's adult years, in addition to Matilda Hays , were Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon . Procter was also a member of the Portfolio Society ...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Katharine Tynan
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...
Intertextuality and Influence Germaine Greer
The introduction begins, It is not quite forty years since eliminating menopause was first mooted.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
1
It moves swiftly into the concept of a fear or hatred of old women, which Greer names anophobia.
Greer, Germaine. The Change. Penguin.
2
Intertextuality and Influence Emily Dickinson
Religious themes and questions underlie much of the poetry, motivated by ED 's own struggle with Christianity. Her understanding of God is pessimistically expressed in lines such as He fumbles at your Soul
As Players...
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
Intertextuality and Influence Germaine Greer
The chapters are headed with quotations ranging eclectically through the international canon and counter-canon from Sophocles and The Ramayana of Valmiki (an ancient Indian epic) to Spike Milligan , via Charles Baudelaire , T. S. Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence Sylvia Kantaris
The poems here are full of places—real ones, like St Ives, Zennor, a rain-forest in Queensland, Australia; also the dystopias of Snapshotland (where everyone is happy all the time.)
Kantaris, Sylvia. The Sea at the Door. Secker and Warburg.
4
and...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Agnes Hamilton
Her title makes multiple allusion to disparate other texts. Its first four words are quoted from a poem of aspiration by Christina Rossetti ; the rest of it alludes to E. M. Forster 's semi-disillusioned...

Timeline

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Texts

Rossetti, Christina. Time Flies. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; E. and J. B. Young, 1902.
Rossetti, Christina. Verses. Privately printed at G. Polidori’s, 1847.
Rossetti, Christina. Verses. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge; E. & J. B. Young, 1893.