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1830-1894 poet 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. Due to his father’s sickness 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." After rejecting Cayley in 1866, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people. Although pretty much a stay-at-home person, her circle included her brothers' friends, like Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Her first verses were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ, which was founded by her brother William Michael and his friends. The publication of Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862 marked the first literary success of the Pre-Raphaelites. This heralded a form of poetry which had no lack of readers. Rossetti often found herself caught between the claims of worldly passion and celestial faith - this schism was central to her life and her poetry and may have its origin in the tension between her Italian and English ancestry. In 1883 she was asked to write a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but declined because Robert Browning did not appear to want to cooperate actively. She did accept a commision to write on Anne Radcliffe, and was excited by the idea of writing about one of her influences as a child. Unfortunately she was forced to give up the plan because she could not gather enough material to write a history that would give her subject credit. 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 on Sources:
www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rossetti.htm http://65.107.211.206/crossetti/crov.html |
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Christina
Rossetti [