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 One
of the most important English woman poets, the sister of the painter-poet
Dante Gabriel Rossetti and a member of the Pre-Raphaelite art movement.
'A Birthday,' 'When I Am Dead,' and 'Up-Hill' are probably Rossetti's
best-known single works. After a serious illness in 1874, she rarely
received visitors or went outside her home. Her favourite themes
were unhappy love and premature resignation. Her later works especially
deal with sombre religious feelings.
Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day's journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
(from 'Up-Hill', 1861)
Christina Rossetti was born in London, one of four children of
Italian parents. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854),
professor of Italian at King's College from 1831. He resigned in
1845 because of blindness. Christina was educated at home by her
mother, Frances Polidori, a former governess. She shared her parents'
interest in poetry and was portrayed in the paintings and drawings
of the Pre-Raphaelites. Christina was the model for her brother's
picture The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), the first picture
to be signed P.R.B.
Rossetti's first verses were written in 1842 and printed by her
grandfather's private press. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen
Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite
journal The Germ, which was founded by her brother William
and his friends. When the family was in financial trouble, she helped
her mother to keep a school at Frome, Somerset. The school was not
a success, and they returned to London in 1854.
Rossetti's deeply religious temperament moulded her melancholic
writing. She was a devout High Anglican, much influenced by the
Tractarians. Rossetti broke her engagement to the artist James Collison,
an original member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, when he joined
the Roman Catholic Church. She also rejected Charles Bagot Cayley
for religious reasons.
By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves' disease, a thyroid disorder,
had made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as
a governess. Her illness confined her to a quiet life, but she continued
to write. Among her later works are A PAGEANT AND OTHER POEMS (1881),
and THE FACE OF THE DEEP (1892). She was considered a possible successor
to Alfred Tennyson as poet laureate, but she developed a fatal cancer
in 1891, and died in London on December 29, 1894.
Rossetti's best-known work, GOBLIN MARKET AND OTHER POEMS, was
published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant
voice in Victorian poetry. The title poem is a cryptic fairy-tale
and tells the story of two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted
to eat the fruit of the goblin men. After eating the fruit, Laura
cannot see the goblins. They attack Lizzie, whose refusal has angered
the goblins, and she saves her sister in an act of sacrifice. Laura,
longing to taste again the fruit, licks the juices with which Lizzie
is covered. "For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or
stormy weather." THE PRICE'S PROGRESS, AND OTHER POEMS, appeared
in 1866. SING SONG. A NURSERY RHYME BOOK was illustrated by Arthur
Hughes in 1872. Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such
as SEEK AND FIND (1879), CALLED TO BE SAINTS (1881) and THE FACE
OF THE DEEP (1892). Rossetti's brother, William Michael, edited
her complete works in 1904. Her work has suffered from reductive
interpretations, but she is increasingly reconsidered as a major
Victorian poet. Typical of her poetic style are a songlike way with
words and use of short, irregularly rhymed lines.
A birthday
My heart is like a singing bird
Whose heart is in a watered shoot:
 My
heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That Paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these
Because my love is come to me.
Raise me dais of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.
For further information: Christina Rossetti, a Biographical
and Critical Study by MacKenzie Bell (1930); Christina Georgina
Rossetti by Eleanor Thomas (1931); Christina Rossetti by Marya
Zaturenska (1970); Christina Rossetti by Dorothy M. Stuart (1971);
Christina Rossetti by M. Bell (1971); Christina Rossetti and Her
Poetry by Edith Birkhead (1974); Four Rossettis by S. Weintraub
(1977); The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti by Nilda
Jimenez (1979); A Divided Life by G. Battiscombe (1981); Christina
Rossetti: Criticsal Perspectives, 1862-1982 by Edna Charles (1985);
Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance by Dolores Rosenblum
(1987); The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. by D.A. Kent
(1989); Christina Rossetti and the Poetry of Discovery by Katherine
J. Mayberry (1989); Christina Rossetti by Sharon Smulders (1996);
The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian
Contexts, ed. by Mary Arseneau (1999); Christina Rossetti: Faith,
Gender, and Time by Diane D'Amico (1999)
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