Christina+Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti (December 5, 1830-December 29, 1894), was the youngest of four children, her siblings were Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the well-known Pre-Raphaelite painter/poet), William Michael Rossetti (a less well-known poet of the Pre-Raphaelites) and Maria Francesca Rossetti. She was the daughter of Gabriel Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, a Professor of Italian, and Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori (Duguid). The Rossettis were a scholarly, artistic and liberal family, so it is not a surprise that Christina Rossetti began writing poetry at a very young age. She wrote her first poem when she was about four or five years old, and by the age of twelve she was writing mock ballads (Leighton). She had a happy childhood, as a young girl she was emotional and short tempered (Duguid). In her mid teens, she became “neurotically sel f-aware, always on her guard against sins of vanity and idleness, reluctant to transgress her own strict rules o f behavior” (Duguid). In her late teens, she was involved with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, serving as a model for paintings by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Duguid). She had three marriage proposals in her life, but declined all three for what, as speculation would suggest, were religious reasons. However, she was engaged in 1849 to James Collinson but the engagement ended due to his conversion to Roman Catholicism (Duguid). In the 1860’s, she volunteered at a home for fallen women run by the All Saints Sisterhood (Leighton). She was in ill health for the majority of her life, and in 1872 was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disease that affects the thyroid and often disfigures the face (Duguid). Unfortunately, well before the diagnosis of Graves' disease, her appearance altered dramatically, giving her a prematurely aged appearance (Duguid). Earlier in her life Rossetti exhibited reclusive behavior and it seems that with the onset of Graves’ her reclusive nature became more severe (Leighton). On December 29, 1894, at the age of 64, Christina Rossetti died of complications from cancer (Chapman and Meacock).

Christina Rossetti stands out among female poets of the Victorian era, because she was able to assert herself as a female poet as well as a critique of others work. Much of her work offers a critical view of other poets work as well as her own. She received many unsolicited manuscripts to which she would sometimes offer very icy reviews of the works that she did not admire (Leighton). Although she was connected through her brothers to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, her involvement with the group was strained. In fact, when she applied for membership, she was refused (Easley). However, her contributions to the paper under the pen name, 'Ellen Alleyan' broke through the barriers of the established patriarchal literary community, and "paved the way for later mixed-gender editorial projects" (Easley).

While she contributed much to the Pre- Raphaelite movement in her younger years, as she grew older she became highly reclusive, removing herself from certain social circles. Angela Leighton writes in her book //Victorian Women Poets: Writing against the Heart //, that Christina Rossetti projected very paradoxical impressions of her life: “On the one hand, she embraced the pervasive myth of the woman poet as fitfully inspired, sincere and sad, and too sensitive for real life. On the other hand, she [was] the most calculatingly self-inventing and self-mythologising of poets, whose verse, far from being a ‘one-stringed’ tune of the heart, is full of obliquities, secrets and riddles” (Leighton). This is in fact an incredibly astute description of her life; she was a well-known recluse whose reclusive nature served to confirm her fragile personality, which, in turn, confirmed her emotional state as too sensitive for this world. That is not to say that she enjoyed the company of many and only perpetuated this image, but that she did not attempt to contradict it. As a poet, Christina Rossetti’s works painted such vivid and complex pictures that inspired many questions; thus explaining why her poetry is, into our modern day, being re-imagined and re-interpreted. -- P.G. Murphy, UVic Engl 386/2012W Works Cited

Chapman, Alison and Joanna Meacock. //A Rossetti Family Chronology. // New York: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2007. Print. Duguid, Lindsay.//The Oxford Dictionary of Biography.// Oxford University Press, 2004. Web. 28 January 2012. Leighton, Angela. //Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. //Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. Print. <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 120%;">Easley, Alexis. "Gender And The Politics Of Literary Fame: Christina Rossetti And The Germ." //Critical Survey// 13.2 (2001): 61. Complete. Web. 20 Jan 2016.