Christina Georgina Rossetti (5 December 1830 â 29 December 1894) was an English writer of romantic and devotional poems, including "Goblin Market" and "Remember".
She was the youngest sister of the artist and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and features in several of his paintings, including Ecce Ancilla Domini! (1850). Some of her early poetry, such as "Goblin Market", was influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
She also wrote the words of two Christmas carols well known in Britain: "In the Bleak Midwinter", later set by Gustav Holst, Katherine Kennicott Davis, and Harold Darke, and "Love Came Down at Christmas", also set by Darke and other composers.
Christina was affected throughout her life by depression. She never married, despite receiving three offers, but devoted her life to her poetry and her religious faith.
Christina Rossetti was born on 5 December, 1830 at 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), London. Her father was Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and political exile from Vasto, Italy, and her mother was Frances Polidori, the sister ofJohn William Polidori. She was the youngest of four children: her brother Dante Gabriel became an influential artist and poet, and William Michael and Maria both became writers.
Christina was a precocious child, who dictated her first story to her mother before she learnt to write. Though her brothers were educated at boarding school, Christina and her sister Maria were educated at home by their parents. Christina read a variety of religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels. She delighted in the works of Keats, Scott, Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. The household was open to visiting Italian scholars, artists and revolutionaries. The influence of Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and influenced Christina's later writing. The family home in Bloomsbury was within easy reach of Madame Tussauds, London Zoo and the newly opened Regent's Park, which Christina visited regularly. Unlike her parents, she felt at home in London and was seemingly happy.
In the 1840s, the Rossetti family faced financial troubles due to a deterioration in Gabriele Rossetti's physical and mental health. In 1843, he was diagnosed with persistent bronchitis, possibly tuberculosis, and faced losing his sight. He gave up his teaching post at King's College and though he lived another 11 years, he suffered from depression and was never physically well again. Christina's mother began teaching to support the family, and Maria became a live-in governess, a prospect that Christina dreaded. At the time her brother William was working for the Excise Office and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christina increasingly isolated at home. When she was 14, she suffered a nervous breakdown and left school. Bouts of depression and related illness followed. During this period she, her mother and her sister became absorbed in the Anglo-Catholic movement that developed in the Church of England. Religious devotion came to play a major role in her life.
In her late teens, Christina became engaged to the painter James Collinson, the first of three suitors. He, like her brothers Dante and William, was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, established in 1848. The engagement ended in 1850 when Collinson reverted to Catholicism. In 1853, Christina helped her mother run a school in Fromefield, Frome, but the ventre was not a success. A plaque marks the house. In 1854 they returned to London, where Gabriele Rossetti died. Christina later became involved with the linguist Charles Cayley, but declined to marry him, also for religious reasons. A third offer came from the painter John Brett, whom she likewise refused.
Christina sat for several of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's paintings. In 1848, she sat for the Virgin Mary in his first completed oil painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and the first work he inscribed with the initials "PRB", for the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The following year Christina modelled for his depiction of the Annunciation, Ecce Ancilla Domini!
Christina was also an artist, attending the North London Drawing School in the early 1850s, and later producing her own drawings as guides for the illustrators of her poetry books.
From 1842 onward Christina began writing down and dating her poems. Most of them imitated her favoured poets. In 1847 she began experimenting with verse forms such as sonnets, hymns and ballads, while drawing on narratives from the Bible, folk tales and the lives of saints. Her early pieces often meditate on death and loss in the Romantic tradition. Her first two poems published were "Death's Chill Between" and "Heart's Chill Between", in the Athenaeum magazine in 1848. She used the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" in the literary periodical The Germ, published by the Pre-Raphaelites from January to April 1850 and edited by her brother William. This marked the beginning of her public career.
In 1849 Christina once more became seriously ill with depression, and around 1857 had a major religious crisis.
Christina's more critical reflections on the artistic movement her brother had begun were expressed in an 1856 poem "In the Artist's Studio". Here she reflects on seeing multiple paintings of the same model. For Christina, the artist's idealised vision of the model's character begins to overwhelm his work, until "every canvas means/the one same meaning". Dinah Roe, in her introduction to the Penguin Classics collection of Pre-Raphaelite poetry, argues that this critique of her brother and similar male artists is less about "the objectification of women" than about "the male artist's self-worship".
Christina's first commercially printed collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published under her own name by Macmillan & Co. in 1862, when she was 31. Christina worked as a volunteer in 1859âÂÂ1870 at the London Diocesan Penitentiary in Highgate, a refuge for fallen women â it has been suggested that Goblin Market may have been inspired by some of its inmates. Dante Gabriel Rossetti became his sister's collaborator and created a series of woodcut illustrations to the book. Goblin Market was lauded by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Charles Swinburne and Tennyson, but sales of the book were disappointing. After its publication, Christina Rossetti was named the natural successor to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who had died the year before in 1861. The title poem, one of her best known, is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, but critics have interpreted it in various ways, including as an allegory of temptation and salvation, a comment on Victorian gender roles and female agency, a work of erotic desire and social redemption,and an allegory of "addiction and recovery". There are parallels with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in religious themes of temptation, sin and redemption by vicarious suffering.
In 1883, Swinburne dedicated A Century of Roundels to Christina Rossetti, and she adopted his roundel form in a number of poems, for instance in Wife to Husband. She was ambivalent about women's suffrage, but many have found feminist themes in her work. She opposed slavery in the United States, cruelty to animals in prevalent vivisection, and the exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution.
Christina had a wide circle of friends and correspondents. She continued to write and publish for the rest of her life, mainly devotional work and poetry. In the years just before her death, she wrote The Face of the Deep (1892), a book of devotional prose, and oversaw an enlarged edition of Sing-Song, originally published in 1872, in 1893.
In her later decades, Christina suffered from a type of hyperthyroidism â Graves' disease â diagnosed in 1872, suffering a near-fatal attack in the early 1870s. In 1893, she developed breast cancer. The tumour was removed, but there was a recurrence in September 1893.
Christina Rossetti died of cancer on 29 December 1894 and was buried on 2 January 1895 in the family grave on the west side of Highgate Cemetery, which had been opened in October 1869 so that Gabriel could retrieve a volume of poems he had buried with his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. There she joined her father, mother and Elizabeth. Her brother William was also buried there in 1919, as were the ashes of four subsequent family members.
There is a stone tablet on the façade of 30 Torrington Square, Bloomsbury, marking Christina's final home, where she died.
Christina Rossetti's popularity in her lifetime did not approach that of her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but her standing remained strong after her death. Her popularity faded in the early 20th century in the wake of Modernism, but scholars began to explore Freudian themes in her work, such as religious and sexual repression, reaching for personal, biographical interpretations of her poetry.
Academics studying her work in the 1970s saw beyond the lyrical sweetness to her mastery of prosody and versification. Feminists held her as a symbol of constrained female genius and a leader among 19th-century poets. Her writings strongly influenced writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, and Philip Larkin. The critic Basil de Sélincourt called her "all but our greatest woman poet... incomparably our greatest craftswoman... probably in the first twelve of the masters of English verse."
Rossetti's Christmas poem "In the Bleak Midwinter" became widely known in the English-speaking world after her death, when set as a Christmas carol by Gustav Holst and later by Harold Darke. Her poem "Love Came Down at Christmas" (1885) has also been widely arranged as a carol.
British composers receptive to Christina Rossetti's verse included Alexander Mackenzie (Three Songs, Op. 17, 1878), Frederick Cowen, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Six Sorrow Songs, Op. 57, 1904), Hubert Parry, Hope Squire, Charles Villiers Stanford, and Jack Gibbons (sixteen song settings). In 1918, John Ireland set eight poems from her Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book to music in his song cycle Mother and Child. The first verse of Yoko Ono's song "Who Has Seen the Wind?" (1970) was taken from her homonymous poem.
The poem "Song" was an inspiration for Bear McCreary's composition When I Am Dead, published in 2015. Two of Christina's poems, "Where Sunless Rivers Weep" and "Weeping Willow", were set to music by Barbara Arens in her All Beautiful & Splendid Things: 12 + 1 Piano Songs on Poems by Women (2017, Editions Musica Ferrum). "Love is Like a Rose" was set to music by Constance Cochnower Virtue; "Love Me, I Love You," was set to music by Hanna Vollenhoven; and "Song of the Dawn" was set to music by Elise Fellows White.
In 2000, one of many Millennium projects across the country was a poetry stone placed in what had been the grounds of North Hill House in Frome. On one side is an excerpt from Christina's poem, "What Good Shall My Life Do Me": "Love lights the sun: love through the dark/Lights the moon's evanescent arc:/Same Love lights up the glow-worms spark." She wrote about her brief stay in Frome, which had "an abundance of green slopes and gentle declivities: no boldness or grandeur but plenty of peaceful beauty".
In 2011, Christina Rossetti was a subject of a Radio 4 programme, In Our Time.
The title of J. K. Rowling's novel, The Cuckoo's Calling (2013), is from a line in the poem, A Dirge. The complete poem is the epigraph to the novel.
Christina Rossetti is commemorated in the Church of England calendar on 27 April.