Christina
Rossetti
in full Christina Georgina
Rossetti, pseudonym Ellen Alleyne
born Dec. 5, 1830, London, Eng.
died Dec. 29, 1894, London
one of the most important of English
women poets both in range and quality. She
excelled in works of fantasy, in poems for
children, and in religious poetry.
Christina was the youngest child of
Gabriele Rossetti and was the sister of the
painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. In 1847
her grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, printed
on his private press a volume of her Verses,
in which signs of poetic talent are already
visible. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen
Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the
Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ. In 1853,
when the Rossetti family was in financial
difficulties, Christina helped her mother
keep a school at Frome, Somerset, but it was
not a success, and in 1854 the pair returned
to London, where Christina’s father died. In
straitened circumstances, Christina entered
on her life work of companionship to her
mother, devotion to her religion, and the
writing of her poetry. She was a firm High
Church Anglican, and in 1850 she broke her
engagement to the artist James Collinson, an
original member of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood, because he had become a Roman
Catholic. For similar reasons she rejected
Charles Bagot Cayley in 1864, though a warm
friendship remained between them.
In 1862 Christina published Goblin Market
and Other Poems and in 1866 The Prince’s
Progress and Other Poems, both with
frontispiece and decorations by her brother
Dante Gabriel. These two collections, which
contain most of her finest work, established
her among the poets of her day. The stories
in her first prose work, Commonplace and
Other Short Stories (1870), are of no great
merit, but Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book
(1872; enlarged 1893), with illustrations by
Arthur Hughes, takes a high place among
children’s books of the 19th century.
In 1871 Christina was stricken by Graves’
disease, a thyroid disorder that marred her
appearance and left her life in danger. She
accepted her affliction with courage and
resignation, sustained by religious faith,
and she continued to publish, issuing one
collection of poems in 1875 and A Pageant
and Other Poems in 1881. But after the onset
of her illness she mostly concentrated on
devotional prose writings. Time Flies
(1885), a reading diary of mixed verse and
prose, is the most personal of these works.
Christina was considered a possible
successor to Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as poet
laureate, but she developed a fatal cancer
in 1891. New Poems (1896), published by her
brother, contained unprinted and previously
uncollected poems.
Though she was haunted by an ideal of
spiritual purity that demanded self-denial,
Christina resembled her brother Dante
Gabriel in certain ways, for beneath her
humility, her devotion, and her quiet,
saintlike life lay a passionate and sensuous
temperament, a keen critical perception, and
a lively sense of humour. Part of her
success as a poet arises from the fact that,
while never straining the limits of her
sympathy and experience, she succeeded in
uniting these two seemingly contradictory
sides of her nature. There is a vein of the
sentimental and didactic in her weaker
verse, but at its best her poetry is strong,
personal, and unforced, with a metrical
cadence that is unmistakably her own. The
transience of material things is a theme
that recurs throughout her poetry, and the
resigned but passionate sadness of unhappy
love is often a dominant note.
John Bryson
Ed.
