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Christina Rossetti
Why is Christina Rossetti, probably the major woman poet of Victorian Britain, so invisible today? This is the central question addressed in this biography. Rossetti, author of Goblin Market , My Heart Is Like a Singing Bird and In the Deep Midwinter has often been overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel. Drawing on many sources, this study enables the reader to piece together a more complete picture of this woman whose nature was passionate and contradictory.
446 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 3, 2012
Christina Rossetti wasn't exactly the most exciting woman (and that's putting it gently), but certainly an interesting one. Her insane religiosity and extreme reticence was unappealing at times and embarrassingly, I was more drawn towards her agnostic brothers - the wayward and extravagant Dante Gabriel Rossetti and honest and loyal William Rossetti. Christina didn't make any close friends, she never married, rejecting three marriage offers for mostly religious reasons. After reading the biography, I still don't think I know much about her and perhaps the reason for that is lack of solid biographical information regarding her. E.g. she was known to be a passionate and lively child, yet due to a collapse in her teen years, for reasons the author could only speculate, she grows to be a gloomy and extremely self-conscious woman, living a nun-like life. On the other hand, she was a complex and contradictory character, suffering from the restrictions Victorian society imposed on any respectable woman. She reminded me of Charlotte Bronte, who also had to wear a mask to protect her reputation. As we can hear Bronte's voice through her passionate heroines, Christina also comes alive through her beautifully sweet poetry, which I greatly admire.
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.
P.S. I know this is a shit review.
I tell my secret? No indeed, not I:
Perhaps some day, who knows?
But not today; it froze, and blows and snows,
And you’re too curious: fie!
You want to hear it? well:
Only, my secret’s mine, and I won’t tell.
P.S. I know this is a shit review.
Read
May 21, 2018Best known for her extraordinary long poem Goblin Market, Christina Rossetti is a shadowy figure about whom little is known (in large part because she scrupulously ensured that very little of her more private writings (letters, for example) survived her). Her religion - from which she seems never to have wavered - was a brand of Anglicanism that strikes many modern readers as being rigid and overly concerned with self-denial. She was an inward-looking person who seems to have avoided society and who had few close friends.
She was born in 1830, the youngest of four children. Very close to her mother (suffocatingly so by today's standards), like Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte, she never married, although she was for a time engaged to James Collinson. The engagement appears to have been broken off because of Collinson's wish to convert to Catholicism. Rossetti was very nearly engaged for a second time, when in her thirties: she was in love with Charles Cayley, but when he eventually proposed to her, she mystifyingly turned him down. It is easy to get sidetracked into believing that Rossetti sacrificed the possibility of marriage for the sake of her poetry, although she seems to have had no great fondness for children, and knew what marriage entailed for a Victorian woman. If she chose to devote herself to poetry and God instead, I don't think we should necessarily assume either that she was frightened of sex, or that she was a stereotypical frustrated Victorian spinster. Modest though Rossetti was, her poetry was something she took very seriously.
She began writing from an early age, the much-anthologised Song ('When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me') composed when she was just eighteen. Goblin Market, her masterpiece, is a bizarre poem that is difficult for modern readers to interpret in a non-sexual way, although I feel sure Rossetti would be horrified by some of the things that critics have said about this poem. Thomas suggests that, 'Though nowadays we look on Goblin Market as a story of temptation and sin, to Christina and her contemporaries, it was a story of redemption through sacrifice' - in other words, the poem is influenced more by Rossetti's religious feelings than by any latent sexual ones.
Frances Thomas does well to produce a rich biography of such a shadowy figure - if at the end of the book I feel I don't at all know Christina Rossetti, that is due more to the fact that Rossetti left very little source material that might have revealed her personality (and even in the letters that remain, Rossetti seems determined not to give much of herself away). She seems to have had little in the way of smalltalk, but flashes of Rossetti's sense of humour provide some light to the dour, self-sacrificing image of her that has come down to us.
Thomas quotes generously from Rossetti's poems, but refuses to be led into the trap of reading poetry as pure autobiography. She makes it clear when periods in Rossetti's life are particularly badly documented and doesn't get drawn into making conjectures about Rossetti's life and feelings based on flimsy evidence or hearsay. Christina Rossetti is not a loveable figure, and she is probably doomed to remain in the shadow of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She might well have preferred it that way. [August 2007]
She was born in 1830, the youngest of four children. Very close to her mother (suffocatingly so by today's standards), like Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson and Emily Bronte, she never married, although she was for a time engaged to James Collinson. The engagement appears to have been broken off because of Collinson's wish to convert to Catholicism. Rossetti was very nearly engaged for a second time, when in her thirties: she was in love with Charles Cayley, but when he eventually proposed to her, she mystifyingly turned him down. It is easy to get sidetracked into believing that Rossetti sacrificed the possibility of marriage for the sake of her poetry, although she seems to have had no great fondness for children, and knew what marriage entailed for a Victorian woman. If she chose to devote herself to poetry and God instead, I don't think we should necessarily assume either that she was frightened of sex, or that she was a stereotypical frustrated Victorian spinster. Modest though Rossetti was, her poetry was something she took very seriously.
She began writing from an early age, the much-anthologised Song ('When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me') composed when she was just eighteen. Goblin Market, her masterpiece, is a bizarre poem that is difficult for modern readers to interpret in a non-sexual way, although I feel sure Rossetti would be horrified by some of the things that critics have said about this poem. Thomas suggests that, 'Though nowadays we look on Goblin Market as a story of temptation and sin, to Christina and her contemporaries, it was a story of redemption through sacrifice' - in other words, the poem is influenced more by Rossetti's religious feelings than by any latent sexual ones.
Frances Thomas does well to produce a rich biography of such a shadowy figure - if at the end of the book I feel I don't at all know Christina Rossetti, that is due more to the fact that Rossetti left very little source material that might have revealed her personality (and even in the letters that remain, Rossetti seems determined not to give much of herself away). She seems to have had little in the way of smalltalk, but flashes of Rossetti's sense of humour provide some light to the dour, self-sacrificing image of her that has come down to us.
Thomas quotes generously from Rossetti's poems, but refuses to be led into the trap of reading poetry as pure autobiography. She makes it clear when periods in Rossetti's life are particularly badly documented and doesn't get drawn into making conjectures about Rossetti's life and feelings based on flimsy evidence or hearsay. Christina Rossetti is not a loveable figure, and she is probably doomed to remain in the shadow of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She might well have preferred it that way. [August 2007]
May 10, 2025
This is a very informative book, which is impressive given the apparent dearth of information about, and primary sources concerning Christina Rossetti.
I appreciated the author's stated intention to paint a fully rounded picture of Rossetti, rather than a caricature, but I felt that the author's own biases and preconceptions coloured the writing throughout.
This is particularly apparent in passages about Rossetti's faith. Rossetti was clearly suffering with some kind of mental illness, and this impacted all areas of her life, including religion, but the author seems to take this to mean that more or less all of Rossetti's religious behaviour was essentially a sign of madness. There seems to be very little tolerance for the idea that she might genuinely have believed and got joy and comfort from her belief. Religious comfort is dismissed as 'gloss' or an insincere attempt to appear devout.
That said, I appreciated the way that Rossetti is spared being made a saint either by Victorian standards or modern standards.
The book is a bit heavy going, but I feel much more familiar with (and sympathetic towards) Rossetti and her family!
I appreciated the author's stated intention to paint a fully rounded picture of Rossetti, rather than a caricature, but I felt that the author's own biases and preconceptions coloured the writing throughout.
This is particularly apparent in passages about Rossetti's faith. Rossetti was clearly suffering with some kind of mental illness, and this impacted all areas of her life, including religion, but the author seems to take this to mean that more or less all of Rossetti's religious behaviour was essentially a sign of madness. There seems to be very little tolerance for the idea that she might genuinely have believed and got joy and comfort from her belief. Religious comfort is dismissed as 'gloss' or an insincere attempt to appear devout.
That said, I appreciated the way that Rossetti is spared being made a saint either by Victorian standards or modern standards.
The book is a bit heavy going, but I feel much more familiar with (and sympathetic towards) Rossetti and her family!
July 21, 2025
Although I did not pick up the book with the intention of actually finishing it, I cannot convey the amount of joy it gave me to complete it.
Previously I had believed myself to be enlightened on all there was to Christina, how wrong I have been proven by Frances Thomas whose eloquent and smooth narration of this biography made me once more fall in love with the works of a woman whose life remains much of a mystery even after all the salvageable details have been combined to make a coherent story.
I don't believe we will ever know the full details of her life and perhaps that is for the best as she ensured that this would be so in a diligent manner that was altogether perhaps too successful.
Previously I had believed myself to be enlightened on all there was to Christina, how wrong I have been proven by Frances Thomas whose eloquent and smooth narration of this biography made me once more fall in love with the works of a woman whose life remains much of a mystery even after all the salvageable details have been combined to make a coherent story.
I don't believe we will ever know the full details of her life and perhaps that is for the best as she ensured that this would be so in a diligent manner that was altogether perhaps too successful.
November 8, 2014
I found this book tiresome and I so wanted to like it. In fairness, I purchased it because I desired to discover something about Frances Thomas's writing style - It is a book of undoubted technical writing ability and I believe this is what makes it so sterile - I'm certain many will enjoy it, its not for me (no book will appeal to everyone). Buy it if you have a desire to discover something of Rossetti - If you have no interest in her, I have to write, forget it.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews