| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Christina Georgina Rossetti |
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| Biography: Christina Georgina Rossetti |
The English poet Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) wrote poems of love, fantasy, and nature, verses for children, and devotional poetry and prose.
Christina Rossetti was born on Dec. 5, 1830, in London, the youngest of the four remarkable Rossetti children. Educated entirely at home, she spoke English and Italian with ease and read French, Latin, and German. Her first verses were written to her mother on April 27, 1842. Her first published poems were the seven she contributed in 1850 to the Pre-Raphaelite magazine, the Germ, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne.
When her father died in 1854, Christina became the close companion of her mother and followed her older sister's example in becoming a devout Anglican. Though mild and virtuous, she was frequently anxious about her self-presumed sinfulness. She is said to have pasted strips of paper over the more blasphemous passages in Swinburne's poetry. Yet she remained devoted to her brother, Dante Gabriel, whose life was far from a model of conventional virtue. At 18 she fell in love with James Collinson, a minor Pre-Raphaelite painter, but broke off her engagement to him 2 years later, when he became a Roman Catholic. In 1862 she fell deeply in love with Charles Bagot Cayley. But she again refused to marry, this time because Cayley had no firm religious faith. These two broken love affairs are reflected in many of her poems, especially the sonnet sequence Monna Innominata. In other poems a melancholy regret for lost love is mixed with a disturbing obsession with death. Because she suffered long and frequent periods of poor health, Rossetti came to regard life as physically and emotionally painful and to look forward to death both as a release and as the possible moment of joyful union with God and with those she had loved and lost.
Rossetti's three major volumes of poetry were Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866), and A Pageant and Other Poems (1881). She also published Commonplace (1870), a book of short stories; Sing-song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), beautifully illustrated by Arthur Hughes and a favorite of Victorian children; and Speaking Likenesses (1874), a book of tales for children. But her poetry alone has secured her fame. Her poems, like those of the later Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, reveal a dual, self-contradictory sensibility. They express a sensuous attraction to physical beauty fused with a mystical and saintly religious faith. They are sometimes highly sentimental in tone yet scrupulously austere in diction and form. And throughout many of them one may find a quiet sense of humor that controls the sentimentality and keeps contradictions in balance. "Goblin Market" is certainly her finest poem and her most disturbing in its presentation of the conflict between sisterly love and destructive passion.
From 1871 through 1873 Rossetti was stricken by Graves' disease, which ruined her beauty and brought her close to death. When she recovered, she turned almost exclusively to religious writing, publishing a number of devotional books: Annus Domini (1874), Seek and Find (1879), Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals (1881), Letter and Spirit (1882), Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), The Face of the Deep: A Commentary on the Revelation (1892), and Verses (1893). In 1891 she began to suffer from cancer and died, after a long and painful illness, on Dec. 29, 1894, in London.
Further Reading
A wealth of biographical detail is in The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti, edited by her brother William M. Rossetti (1908; repr. 1968); Marya Zaturenska, Christina Rossetti: A Portrait with Background (1949); and The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, edited by Lona M. Packer (1963). The best biography is Lona Packer, Christina Rossetti (1963). An interesting study of her poetry is Thomas B. Swann, Wonder and Whimsy: The Fantastic World of Christina Rossetti (1960).
Additional Sources
Battiscombe, Georgina. Christina Rossetti, a divided life, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981.
Birkhead, Edith. Christina Rossetti & her poetry, Philadelphia: R.West, 1977.
Jones, Kathleen. Learning not to be first: the life of Christina Rossetti, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.
Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: a life, New York: Viking, 1995.
Proctor, Ellen A. A brief of memoir of Christina G. Rossetti, Philadelphia: R. West, 1978.
Sandars, Mary Frances. The life of Christina Rossetti, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980.
Sawtell, Margaret. Christina Rossetti: her life and religion, Philadelphia: R. West, 1977.
Shove, Fredegond. Christina Rossetti: a study, Norwood, Pa.: Norwood Editions, 1977.
| Fairy Tale Companion: Christina Rossetti |
Rossetti, Christina (1830–94), English poet. She is best known today for her brilliant long poem Goblin Market (1862), an extended tale about two sisters who meet a band of sinister half‐human, half‐animal creatures who tempt them to buy exotic fruit. Laura eats the fruit, and then craves more and more—but the next day she cannot find the goblins, and she begins to waste away from longing. Lizzie, who can still see and hear the goblin men, buys their fruit but refuses to eat it; instead, she hurries home to Laura, who licks the juice from Lizzie's face and is cured. The poem draws upon legends about humans who are lost in fairyland after eating enchanted food; but it is also clearly an allegory of sexual sin and redemption that has been interpreted in many ways.
Bibliography
— Alison Lurie
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Christina Georgina Rossetti |
Bibliography
See Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life (1995); studies by E. K. Charles (1985), D. Rosenblum (1986), A. H. Harrison (1988), and D. A. Kent, ed. (1988).
| Quotes By: Christina Rossetti |
Quotes:
"Be the green grass above me, with showers and dewdrops wet; and if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget."
"And all the winds go sighing, for sweet things dying."
"Obedience is the fruit of faith."
"I dream of you to wake; would that I might Dream of you and not wake but slumber on..."
"I might show facts as plain as day: but, since your eyes are blind, you'd say, Where? What? and turn away."
"For there is no friend like a sister in calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, to fetch one if one goes astray, to lift one if one totters down, to strengthen whilst one stands."
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Christina Rossetti
| Wikipedia: Christina Rossetti |
Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 – 29 December 1894) was a British poet, who wrote a variety of romantic, devotional, and children's poems. She is best known for her long poem Goblin Market, her love poem "Remember", and for the words of what became the popular Christmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter".
Contents |
Rossetti was born in London and educated at home by her mother. Her siblings were the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Maria Francesca Rossetti. Their father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian poet and a political asylum seeker from Naples; their mother, Frances Polidori, was the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician, John William Polidori, author of The Vampyre. In the 1840s her family was stricken with severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her father's physical and mental health. When she was 14, Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown and left school.
Her breakdown was followed by bouts of depression and related illness. During this period she, her mother, and her sister became seriously interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that was part of the Church of England. This religious devotion played a major role in Rossetti's personal life. In her late teens she became engaged to the painter James Collinson, who was, like her brothers Dante and William, one of the founding members of the avant-garde artistic group, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but this ended because he reverted to Catholicism. Later she became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley but did not marry him, also for religious reasons. She was a volunteer worker from 1859 to 1870 at the St Mary Magdalene "house of charity" in Highgate, a refuge for former prostitutes.
Christina modelled for several of her brother Dante's most famous works. In 1848 she was the model for the Virgin Mary in his first completed oil painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, which was also the first to be inscribed with the initials "PRB", later to be revealed as standing for "Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood".[1] The following year she repeated that role in his depiction of the Annuciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini.
Rossetti began writing at age 7 but she was 18 when her first published poem appeared in the Athenaeum magazine. Between January and April 1850, the Pre-Raphaelite group published a literary magazine, The Germ, edited by her brother William, to which she contributed. However her most famous collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared in 1862, when she was 31. The collection garnered much critical praise and, according to Jan Marsh, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death" (in 1861) "led to Rossetti being hailed as her natural successor as 'female laureate'." The title poem from this book is one of Rossetti's best known works and, although at first glance it may seem merely to be a nursery rhyme about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, the poem is multi-layered, challenging, and complex. Critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways: seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation; a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency; and a work about erotic desire and social redemption - perhaps influenced by her work with the "fallen women" in Highgate. Some readers have noted its likeness to Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" given both poems' religious themes of temptation, sin and redemption by vicarious suffering.
Her Christmas poem "In the Bleak Midwinter" became widely known after her death when set as a Christmas carol by Gustav Holst as well as by other composers.
Rossetti continued to write and publish for the rest of her life although she focused primarily on devotional writing and children's poetry. She maintained a large circle of friends and for ten years volunteered at a home for prostitutes. She was ambivalent about women's suffrage but many scholars have identified feminist themes in her poetry. Furthermore, as Marsh notes, "she was opposed to war, slavery (in the American South), cruelty to animals (in the prevalent practice of animal experimentation), the exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution and all forms of military aggression."
In the later decades of her life, Rossetti suffered from Graves Disease. In 1893 she developed cancer, and died the following year 29 December 1894; she is buried in Highgate Cemetery. In the early 20th century Rossetti's popularity faded as many respected Victorian writers' reputations suffered from Modernism's backlash. Rossetti remained largely unnoticed and unread until the 1970s when feminist scholars began to recover and comment on her work. In the last few decades Rossetti's writing has been rediscovered and she has regained admittance into the Victorian literary canon.
"The wind is passing threw'
But when the leaves hang trembling
Neither I nor you:
Who has seen the wind?"
"O Earth, lie heavily upon her eyes; Seal her sweet eyes weary of watching, Earth; Lie close around her; leave no room for mirth With its harsh laughter, nor for sound of sighs. She hath no questions, she hath no replies, Hush's in and curtained with a bless dearth Of all that irked her from the hour of birth; With stillness that is almost Paradise. Darkness more clear than noonday holdeth her, Silence more musical than any song; Even her very heart has ceased to stir: Until the morning of Eternity Her rest shall not begin nor end, but be; And when she wakes she will not think it long."
"When I am dead my dearest, sing no sad song for me, Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree. See the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet, And if thou wilt, remember, and if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain, I shall not hear the nightingale sing on as if in pain. And dreaming throughout the twilight that doth not rise nor set, Hap'ly will remember, and happily will forget".
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 | Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Fairy Tale Companion. The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
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| Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/. Read more |
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