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.
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...
Literary responses
Jean Ingelow
On 1 December 1863, Christina Rossetti
wrote to her publisher, Miss Procter
I am not afraid of; but Miss Ingelow . . . would be a formidable rival to most men, and to any woman...
Literary responses
Jean Ingelow
JI
was wildly successful during her life—she even had a ship named after her while she lived—but it is only very recently that a resurgence of scholarship on and appreciation of her has begun. An...
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
A. Mary F. Robinson
Reviewers found in it a naiveté and artlessness which clearly pleased them. The Academy found the poems so natural sometimes with their faults and their freshness that they affect one like voices out of the...
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
Dora Greenwell
During her lifetime, DG
maintained a loyal and consistent following. William Michael Rossetti
said of her that she produced some work both refined and of genuine feeling to which her appearance and manner corresponded.
Battiscombe, Georgina. Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life. Constable.
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
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.