Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti

They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much) objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.Īfter rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.Īll three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. From the early 1860s, she in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because 'she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian.' Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Thereafter, a recurring illness, diagnosed as sometimes angina and sometimes tuberculosis, interrupted a very retiring life that she led. When failing health and eyesight forced the professor into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother started a day school, attempting to support the family, but after a year or so, gave it away. In 1848, James Collinson, one of the minor pre-Raphaelite brethren, engaged her but reverted to Roman Catholicism and afterward ended the engagement. Despite her fundamentally religious temperament, closer to that of her mother, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.ĭante made seemingly quite attractive if not beautiful but somewhat idealized sketches of Christina as a teenager.

Christina Georgina Rossetti, sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, wrote lyrical religious works and ballads, such as ' Up-hill' (1861).įrances Polidori Rossetti bore this most important women poet writing in nineteenth-century England to Gabriele Rossetti.

Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti