CONDENSED CONTEXT
CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-94)
Parents:
Gabriele Rossetti- poet and political exile. His health deteriorated by the 1940s and he was
later diagnosed with consistent bronchitis. He was interested in Dante’s works and wrote
commentary on them, as well as teaching the writer’s works to his children.
Frances Polidori
At 14 years old, she left school after suffering a nervous breakdown.
By her late teens, Rossetti accepted an engagement from the painter James Collinson.
However, she ended their engagement in 1850 when he reverted to Catholicism.
In 1954 Christina’s father died. She also applied to join her Aunt Eliza as a nurse under the
instruction of Florence Nightingale, however she was turned down because of her youth and
inexperience.
In 1857, Christina experienced a religious crisis which prevented her from taking the
sacraments.
In the autumn of 1866, she declined an offer of marriage to Charles Cayley for religious
reasons.
In the 1870s, Christina was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, which permanently changed her
appearance.
Her death was in 1894 due to breast cancer.
Christina’s works
Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics; her poetry is marked by
symphystic religious lyrics; her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling.
She wrote about love, death, social mores, religion, contemporary politics and the natural
world. In another sense, however, it is often hard to grasp exactly what she is saying about
any one of these topics.
Between 1874 and 1893, she produced 6 volumes of devotional prose, 5 of which were
published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She also published 2 books of
short stories during her writing career: Commonplace was a book for adults, exploring
themes such as sisterhood, rivalry, jealousy and insecurity. Speaking Likenesses was written
for children and seeks to impart several moral lessons.
Features of Christina’s poetry:
, - Lyrical poetry
- Dialogue
- Concise, simple poetry
- Sensual language
- Biblical and literary allusions
- Archaisms
- Paradox
- Symbolism, extended metaphors, allegories
- Natural imagery
- Use of fictitious personas
- Emotional restraint, a deliberate and knowing ambiguity
- Blending of religious and romantic love
- There is a distinctly medieval feel about several of Rossetti’s narrative poems- vivid
and sharply defined pictures of human hurts and joys.
‘Given her respect for God’s image in humankind and in the goodness of
creation, certain causes she espoused nevertheless made their way into her
poetry: she contributed a short piece of verse whose topic was kindness to
animals, and which benefited the Anti-Vivisectionist Society. Another
poem, “The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children,” may have been
prompted by her experience at Highgate: the speaker, an illegitimately
conceived daughter, reproaches the father who abandoned her and forced
her mother to live a lie.
Perhaps the genius of Christina Rossetti’s work is that it dramatizes the
journey of the soul that strives to do good and to love neighbor and God
well.
For example, the use of the word sweet in her work illuminates the tension
and paradox of the affirmative and the negative way: loving the world and
yet rejecting it for the sake of Christ; savoring the short-lived sweet things
of this life and the longing for the undying sweetness of eternity.’
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood- a group of young British painters who banded together in
1848 in reaction against what they conceived to be the unimaginative and artificial historical
painting of the Royal Academy. Their aim was to revive British art; to make it as dynamic
and powerful as the late medieval and early Renaissance works. Their works had a
luminosity and purity. They frequently drew subject matter from literature.
A moral perspective is clearly present in Pre-Raphaelite depiction of the plight of women
who had fallen into prostitution. Dante's poem ‘Jenny’ is about a prostitute and in his
picture ‘Found’ (1855) he shows an understanding of how some women ‘fall’. In ‘The
