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.
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...
Literary responses
Lilian Bowes Lyon
Cecil Day-Lewis
later took this volume to represent, alone, her early period. He found it clean in outline, of a decisive, spontaneous simplicity at its best . . . but never flat.He noted her...
Literary responses
Felicia Hemans
FH
remained continuously in print throughout the Victorian period, but her critical reputation and popularity waned before its close and died with modernism. She lingered on in popular memory as the author of popular recitation...
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
The Athenæum reviewer confessed to some initial prejudice against the series as such, on the grounds that people of average intelligence and industry
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2596 (1877): 103
should be quite capable of learning enough of any...
Wisker, Alistair et al. “Introduction: A Literary Appreciation”. Doreen Wallace, 1897-1989: Writer and Social Campaigner, Edwin Mellen Press, p. xvii - xxi.
xviii
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
The reviewer professed to find it painful to have to speak with severity of any book from the hand of a writer so good in her own line as Mrs. Oliphant
.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2596 (1877): 104
Literary responses
Christina Fraser-Tytler
Alfred H. Miles
, in The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, recorded a particular appreciation for Absolution, a poem here about a married woman who accidentally encounters a lover from...
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...
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
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
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
