ABSTRACT
If, as Tricia Lootens notes, 'Rossetti evoked E.B.B.' s fame by the mere act of publishing a sonnet sequence' (1996, p.162), then she also evoked her brother's, all the more so as they shared a name and as he had recently been identified as the 'master' of many younger sonneteers in the Contemporary Review (Noble, 1880, p.468). Recent critics of Rossetti have tended to read her work in the context more of other women poets than of her male contemporaries, acting as a corrective to the long-standing critical habit of associating her with the so-called 'PreRaphaelite' poets of her brother's - and her own - circle. Yet the influence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti on late Victorian poetry in general and on the sonnet sequence in particular was so pervasive that to ignore it is to distort the context in which his sister was writing. This is not to say that Christina Rossetti ever merely follows in her brother's footsteps. Typically, indeed, her poetry functions as a counter-weight to his. Betty Flowers argues that Christina Rossetti seeks to explore and represent female psychology, largely ignored by the love poetry of her male contemporaries - Gabriel included - 'who continued to write of women from "fancy" rather than from "feeling," and whose every woman was modelled on the same ideal'. Flowers's account of Gabriel's poetry is unduly reductive, but her suggestion that Christina's sonnet sequence is 'an educational "journey" [ ... ] designed to teach' the poets of his school and their readers is apt not only to her perceptions of gender-relations but also to her religion (1992, p.17). Marjorie Stone reads Monna Innominata as charting an 'ascent to heavenly love [ ... ] as a corrective for the emphasis on human love in the Sonnets from the Portuguese and her brother's House of Life' (1999, p.48). Stone concentrates predominantly on the intertextual encounter between Rossetti and Barrett Browning, but the opposition between Rossetti and her brother was more absolute and the conflict between them altogether more vital, not least because of the reach of what was to Christina his pernicious influence. Focussing on her religious position, and tracing the allusions and reactions to The House of Life within both Monna Innominata and Later Life, it becomes clear that Christina Rossetti re-deploys the form 'bequeathed' (Rees, 1981, p.165) by her brother to voice an exclusively Christian response to the deepening crisis of belief to which the Inclusiveness of The House of Life contributes.
