ABSTRACT
A great deal more is known about Christina Rossetti’s life than about that of any of the other poets in this volume. This is not just owing to the amount of respect earned by her work during her lifetime, although that was considerable. It is also because she was born into a family containing two highly gifted male children as well as a sister and herself. The boys grew up to be extremely well-known figures, one (William Michael) a literary critic and editor and the other (Dante Gabriel) a famous artist and poet. Naturally this made the literary market peculiarly receptive to the productions of the family’s outstanding female member, and it also encouraged archivists to preserve her manuscripts for posterity, along with those of her brothers, in a way that was quite unusual for female writers. Yet there still remains a deep sense of hiddenness at the core of her life. Christina Georgina Rossetti was born in London in 1830, the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti, Italian patriot and professor of Italian at King’s College, London, and his wife Frances, née Polidori, who had been brought up in England but was of Italian descent. She was educated largely by her mother, and shared many of her brothers’ intellectual interests, although she declined joining the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, as their group of fellow bohemian artists and writers chose to call themselves. She did, however, occasionally serve as artist’s model to her brother, and he in turn lent her his advice on her poetry. She published some early poems in their magazine, The Germ, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne. She wrote over 900 poems in English and 60 in Italian: most were religious and devotional (pious but rarely sentimental), though some were love poems (usually stressing sadness, loss, and death, subverting conventional romantic views), or ballads (often focusing shrewdly on jealousy and betrayal).
