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.
GMH
won the Poetry Prize at Highgate School
in 1860, the year he turned sixteen. He was still writing as an undergraduate at Oxford
in 1863-7. But when he became a Jesuit
in 1868 he...
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...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rosa Nouchette Carey
The chapter-headings of this novel are mostly from male writers, but among them is Christina Rossetti
. The story begins with several deaths, most notably that of Lady Car Lorimer, strong-minded and beloved wife of...
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...
Godden, Rumer. A Time to Dance, No Time to Weep. Macmillan.
218 and n
Leisure and Society
Isabella Banks
Despite increasing poverty, the family socialised widely: Christina Rossetti
called IB
's Sunday evening gatherings at home attractively unceremonious.
Burney, Edward Lester. Mrs. G. Linnaeus Banks. E. J. Morten.
84
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
Katharine Tynan
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
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
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
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...