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.
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...
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
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
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...
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
Caroline Bowles
Scholar Margaret M. Morlier
argues that The Young Grey Head influenced Christina Rossetti
's Goblin Market. Morlier argues that Rossetti's poem revises the specific scene of fever delirium but features an similarly afflicted sister...
Intertextuality and Influence
Emily Dickinson
Among our contemporary poets, Adrienne Rich
has offered this reading of ED
's life and works: Emily Dickinson—viewed by her bemused contemporary Thomas Higginson as partially cracked, by the twentieth century as fey or...
Friends, Associates
Ellen Wood
As she began to establish herself as a writer, EW
became a friend of her fellow authors Anna Maria Hall
, Julia Kavanagh
, and Mary Howitt
. The latter wrote her a complimentary letter...
Beginning in 1854, BRP
and Barbara Leigh Smith participated in a society called the Portfolio Club in order to exhibit and share comment on their own and other women's artistic and literary creations. Other members...