Christina Rossetti

Born

in London, The United Kingdom

December 05, 1830

Died

December 29, 1894

Genre

Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

Judging from somewhat idealized sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been quite attractive if not beautiful. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he reverted to Roman Catholicism.

When Professor Rossetti's failing health and Christina Georgina Rossetti, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. Although her fundamentally religious temperament was closer to her mother's, this youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics inherited many of her artistic tendencies from her father.

Judging from somewhat idealized sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been quite attractive if not beautiful. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he reverted to Roman Catholicism.

When Professor Rossetti's failing health and eyesight forced him into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, but had to give it up after a year or so. Thereafter she led a very retiring life, interrupted by a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. From the early '60s on she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, refused to marry him because "she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian." Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste. Lona Mosk Packer argues that her poems conceal a love for the painter William Bell Scott, but there is no other evidence for this theory, and the most respected scholar of the Pre-Raphaelite movement disputes the dates on which Packer thinks some of the more revealing poems were written.

All three Rossetti women, at first devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England, were drawn toward the Tractarians in the 1840s. They nevertheless retained their evangelical seriousness: Maria eventually became an Anglican nun, and Christina's religious scruples remind one of Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch : as Eliot's heroine looked forward to giving up riding because she enjoyed it so much, so Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning; pasted paper strips over the antireligious parts of Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon (which allowed her to enjoy the poem very much); objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman; and refused even to go see Wagner's Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante's breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894.

...more

Combine Editions
Christina Rossetti’s books

Average rating: 4.04 · 22,553 ratings · 1,008 reviews · 195 distinct works • Similar authors

	Goblin Market by Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Illustrator) , William Morris (Illustrator) 4.08 avg rating — 10,478 ratings — published 1862 — 52 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Goblin Market and Other Poems by Christina Rossetti, Candace Ward (Editor) 4.07 avg rating — 3,629 ratings — published 1862 — 54 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Complete Poems by Christina Rossetti, Betty Sue Flowers (Introduction) , Betty Flowers (Introduction) 4.05 avg rating — 1,974 ratings — published 1862 — 10 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Poems of Christina Rossetti by Christina Rossetti, Florence Harrison (Illustrator) , Kathryn W. Plosica (Designed by) 4.04 avg rating — 1,135 ratings — published 1986 — 17 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Selected Poems of Christina Rossetti 4.05 avg rating — 725 ratings — published 1970 — 36 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Rossetti: Poems 4.12 avg rating — 143 ratings — published 1993 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems 3.98 avg rating — 242 ratings — 38 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Sing-Song by Christina Rossetti, Arthur Hughes (Illustrator) 3.62 avg rating — 78 ratings — published 1947 — 24 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Poems and Prose by Christina Rossetti, Jan Marsh (Editor) 4.08 avg rating — 96 ratings — published 1995 — 8 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	A Choice of Christina Rossetti's Verse 4.02 avg rating — 64 ratings — published 1970 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

More books by Christina Rossetti…

Quotes by Christina Rossetti

“One day in the country
Is worth a month in town”
― Christina Rossetti

1051 likes

“For there is no friend like a sister
In calm or stormy weather;
To cheer one on the tedious way,
To fetch one if one goes astray,
To lift one if one totters down,
To strengthen whilst one stands”
― Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market and Other Poems

tags: dependability, help, love, sisters

429 likes

“When I Am Dead, My Dearest

When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress-tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.

I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain:
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.”
― Christina Rossetti, Complete Poems

tags: death, poetry

343 likes

See all Christina Rossetti's quotes »

Polls

Who is your favorite poet?

Edgar Allan Poe

27 votes, 10.2%

Emily Dickinson

23 votes, 8.7%

T. S. Eliot (write-in)

18 votes, 6.8%

William Butler Yeats

15 votes, 5.7%

Robert Frost

15 votes, 5.7%

William Shakespeare

14 votes, 5.3%

William Blake (write-in)

11 votes, 4.2%

Percy Bysshe Shelley

9 votes, 3.4%

Sylvia Plath

9 votes, 3.4%

Robert frost (write-in)

8 votes, 3.0%

Walt Whitman (write-in)

8 votes, 3.0%

Edna St. Vincent Millay

7 votes, 2.7%

Jon Keats (write-in)

6 votes, 2.3%

Alfred Tennyson

6 votes, 2.3%

Robert Burns

6 votes, 2.3%

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

5 votes, 1.9%

I'm not a fan of poetry (write-in)

5 votes, 1.9%

Bob Dylan

5 votes, 1.9%

Edgar Allan Poe, Shelley, Shakespeare and Jim Morrison, also Alfred Noyes

5 votes, 1.9%

Christina Rossetti

4 votes, 1.5%

Jim Morrison (write-in)

4 votes, 1.5%

Franz Kafka (write-in)

4 votes, 1.5%

Charles Baudelaire (write-in)

4 votes, 1.5%

Seamus Heaney (write-in)

3 votes, 1.1%

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (write-in)

3 votes, 1.1%

George Sterling (write-in)

3 votes, 1.1%

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (write-in)

3 votes, 1.1%

Carl Sandburg

3 votes, 1.1%

W. H. Auden (write-in)

3 votes, 1.1%

Tomas Tranströmer or Kahlil Gibran (write-in)

3 votes, 1.1%

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (write-in)

2 votes, 0.8%

Anne Sexton

2 votes, 0.8%

Clement Clarke Moore

2 votes, 0.8%

Stephen Vincent Benét

1 vote, 0.4%

Hugo Claus (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Matsuo Basho (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

juana de ibarbourou (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

John Keats and Giacomo Leopardi (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

James Whitcomb Riley

1 vote, 0.4%

Robert Service (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Robert Louis Stevenson

1 vote, 0.4%

A. S. Pushkin (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Andrew Hozier-Byrne (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Big L (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Edward Lear (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Theodor Geisel (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Arthur Rimbaud (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Lord Byron (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

San Juan de la Cruz (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Wilfred Owen (write-in)

1 vote, 0.4%

Frank O'Hara (write-in)

0 votes, 0.0%

Alfred Noyes

0 votes, 0.0%

264 total votes

9 comments

More...

Topics Mentioning This Author

topics	posts	views	last activity
One Million Pages...: Amanda's Pages	29	69	Nov 28, 2011 11:04AM
100+ Books in 2019: Amanda's Reads 2010	63	79	Dec 31, 2011 02:00PM
Challenge: 50 Books: Aubrey's 50 in 2011	54	50	Jan 12, 2012 04:18AM
Books on the Nigh...: Just the Facts...tidbits about Authors	57	91	Jan 30, 2012 10:41AM
Children's Books: Good Poetry Books?	38	227	Feb 23, 2013 08:24AM
Reading with Style: RwS Completed Tasks - Summer 2013	662	113	Aug 31, 2013 09:06PM
YA Reads for Teac...: January 2013 - Professional Development - How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster	27	61	Jan 14, 2014 04:57PM
The Next Best Boo...: What Poetry Do You Like? Talk About Poetry.	9	35	Feb 09, 2015 03:20PM

More…