71 Biography: Christina Rossetti
Artist | Dante Gabriel Rossetti Source | Wikimedia Commons License | Public Domain
(1830-1894)
Born into an artistic family—her brother was D. G. Rossetti—Christina Rossetti started writing while still in her teens. An unofficial member of the Pre-Raphaelites, Christina published seven of her poems in The Germ. She also was briefly engaged to marry John Collinson (1825-1881), a Pre-Raphaelite, until he returned to Roman Catholicism.
A strong evangelical, Rossetti wrote religious lyrical poetry and prose works, including Seek and Find (1879), Called To Be Saints (1881), and The Face of the Deep (1892). Her most famous work, Goblin Market, is rich with religious imagery channeling both spiritual and (uncannily) physical temptation, passion, and redemption. Its erotic undertones are softened and made acceptable to contemporary readers by its child-like, fairy-tale structure, and conventional moral. Its exploration of a “fallen” woman who is not ejected from Eden may have been influenced by Rossetti’s volunteer work at St. Mary Magdalene’s home for prostitutes and unwed mothers.
Other of Rossetti’s works were more straightforwardly intended for children, including Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book (1872). She also published a hybrid of poetry and prose, Time Flies (1882), and encyclopedic entries on Italian literature.
Though on the surface she lived the house-bound life of an unmarried woman devoted to her family, Rossetti nevertheless entered the public realm with her writing, her many friendships with fellow writers and artists, and her social work. Her writing, with its somewhat general themes of faith and love, expresses her individuality and intense feelings through its metrical mastery, painterly details, and natural imagery.
Rossetti died of breast cancer in 1894.
This material is from British Literature II: Romantic Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond by Bonnie J. Robinson from the University System of Georgia, which is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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