Educated at home amid a family whose men were intellectual, political and artistic, and whose women were devoutly religious, Rossetti lived in London with them nearly all her life.  Her father, a political exile from Italy, was a profess at King's College. One e brother, William Michael, was an editor, translator, and art critic; her other brother Dante Gabriel, a renowned artist and poet.  As children, she and her brothers wrote journals together, and her brothers later criticized and edited her work. Christina Rossetti has sometimes been called the "high priestess of Pre -Raphaelitism."

Equally important to her development as another mid-century movement.  Like her Anglo-Italian mother and her sister Marisa, who became an Anglican nun, Rossetti was greatly influenced by the Oxford Movement, which sought to bring into the Anglican church early Catholic doctrines and ritual. So strict was her devotion that she allegedly twice rejected marriage proposals because her suitors religious beliefs were not precisely congruent with her own.  While Rossetti's poetry has the fresh pictorial quality and the erotic luxuriousness of Pre-Raphaelite art, much of its arises from combing the sensual with the ascetic and the erotic with the renunciatory. Although her family history accounts to some extent for the opposing tendencies, she remains nonetheless and enigmatic literary figure about whom there is little biographical or critical agreement.0

The discrepancy between the passionate intensity of Rossetti's poetry and her quiet, retiring life has obsessed many of her biographers. Yearning, loss and balked desire are mayor themes in her writings, and melancholy its most dominant tone.  Her poems give such direct immediacy to love's frustrations and desires that several biographers have been tempted to posit various "lost lovers," or to view her poetry as pitting woman against saint or sacrificing one to the other.  Others argue against the rigidity of regarding art as dependent upon lived (as opposed to imagined) experience. They see in Christina Rossetti a complex rather than a a "divided self," and one that included the eccentricity, whimsical ingenuity and delicate wry humor also revealed in much of her poetry.

Though highly regarded in her own time, Christina Rossetti received little critical attention in the decades after her death.  While her highly wrought verse forms were recognized as finely crafted, her lucid images, simple diction, and clear style created from readers the illusion of a simple surface. Other were put off by her subject matter. More recently revisionist essays have explored how Rossetti's' poetry negotiates between her own experience and the social conventions and literary traditions she inherited, and have uncovered in her severe Christianity a modest and oblique, yet critical, radicalism.  These revaluations have given new pertinence to Virginia Woolf's evaluation of Cristina Rossetti: "Modest as you were, still you were drastic, sure of your gift, convinced of your vision."

    Reading Questions

Goblin Market Illustrations

Christina Rossetti and her Mother

by Charles Dogdson