Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Biography

Christina Rossetti was born into a family shaped by exile, intellect, and artistic ambition. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a Neapolitan patriot and Dante scholar who fled to England after supporting Italian revolutionary causes; her mother, Frances Polidori Rossetti, was an Anglo-Italian governess with literary gifts of her own. Their London home became a gathering place for Italian expatriates and a crucible of aesthetic and political discourse. In this atmosphere, Rossetti was raised among the intersecting pressures of Romanticism, exile, and devout Anglicanism.

Rossetti’s adolescence was marked by a series of losses and constraints. Her father suffered a debilitating illness that rendered him permanently incapacitated, and the family’s financial security deteriorated. Christina herself began experiencing recurring health problems that would shadow her adult life. During this period, she, her mother, and her sister Maria became deeply involved in the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England, a spiritual orientation that would shape Rossetti’s life and art with increasing intensity. She renounced theater, opera, and even chess. She refused two marriage proposals on religious grounds: one suitor had converted to Roman Catholicism, and the other was deemed insufficiently devout.

The language of renunciation became one of her central aesthetic tools. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar describe Rossetti’s achievement as “an aesthetics of renunciation,” rooted in poetic strategies of negation, deferral, and spiritual longing that offer a paradoxically powerful articulation of the self in opposition to worldly temptation and patriarchal expectation.^[1] William Michael Rossetti, her brother and literary executor, saw this same quality in ethical terms, calling her “replete with the spirit of self-postponement.”^[2]

Rossetti’s first published volume, Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), announced a poet of striking formal and thematic range. The collection spans the pure lyric, the devotional sonnet, the moral fable, and the folk ballad. Though sometimes loosely associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, particularly through her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s influence on the volume’s illustrations and publication, her poetry ultimately resists that affiliation. Jerome McGann suggests that Rossetti is best understood as “one of nineteenth-century England’s greatest ‘Odd Women,’” invoking George Gissing’s term for women who remain outside of marriage and conventional cultural scripts.^[3]

Rossetti’s religious convictions were inseparable from her poetics. For over a decade, she volunteered at a penitentiary for women seeking rehabilitation after incarceration or prostitution, work that sharpened her attentiveness to gender, agency, and grace. Her devotional verse blends spiritual intensity with formal control, often refracting desire, death, and duty through eschatological hope. Virginia Woolf observed that Rossetti’s work pairs the sensuousness of poetry with the severity of faith: “No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes.”^[4] And in a letter praising her lyrical gifts, Woolf added that Rossetti’s poetry “sing[s] like music in one’s ears, like a melody by Mozart or an air by Gluck.”^[5]

Standard Editions

• Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Edited by R. W. Crump, 3 vols., Louisiana State University Press, 1979–1990.

• Rossetti, Christina. Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. Edited by Betty S. Flowers, Penguin Classics, 2001.

• Rossetti, Christina. Poems and Prose. Edited by Simon Humphries, Oxford University Press, 2008.

• Rossetti, Christina. Selected Poems. Edited by Dinah Roe, Penguin Classics, 2008.

Reference Texts and Biographical Studies

• Avery, Simon. Christina Rossetti. Northcote House Publishers, 2010.

• Harrison, Antony H. Christina Rossetti in Context. University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

• Janzen Kooistra, Lorraine. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Ohio University Press, 2002.

• Marsh, Jan. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography. Viking, 1994.

• Palazzo, Lynda. Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology. Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. “Rossetti, Christina Georgina (1830–1894).” Oxford University Press.

Key Literary Criticism, Edited Collections, Thematic Studies & Essays

• Armstrong, Isobel. “Christina Rossetti’s Sing-Song: Three Illustrators, Three Readings of Image and Text.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 60, no. 4, 2022, pp. 1–31.

• Arseneau, Mary, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, editors. The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts. Ohio University Press, 1999.

• Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979.

• Hansen, Megan L. “Vision, Vulnerability, and the Victorian Marketplace in Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” Journal of Victorian Culture, vol. 26, no. 1, 2021, pp. 21–38.

• Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.

• Mason, Emma. Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Oxford University Press, 2019.

• Mason, Emma. “Considering the Lilies: Christina Rossetti’s Ecological Jesus.” The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Elizabeth Ludlow, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, pp. 149–161.

• McGann, Jerome. Christina Rossetti in a Victorian Context. University of Virginia Press, 1992.

• Menke, Richard. “The Political Economy of Fruit: Goblin Market.” The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts, edited by Mary Arseneau, Antony H. Harrison, and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Ohio University Press, 1999, pp. 105–136.

• Reynolds, Margaret. “Christina Rossetti and the Aesthetics of the Sing-Song.” Christina Rossetti: A Writer’s Life, edited by Jan Marsh, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 91–115.

• Rosenblum, Dolores. Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance. Southern Illinois University Press, 1986.

• Taft, Joshua. “Christina Rossetti’s Questions: Riddles, Catechisms, and Mystery.” Victorian Poetry, vol. 60, no. 4, 2022, pp. 487–510.

• Tucker, Herbert F. “Rossetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye.” Representations, vol. 82, no. 1, Spring 2003, pp. 117–133.

• Vasington, Grace. “John Henry Newman, Christina Rossetti, and the Formation of Victorian Reading Practices.” Victorian Studies, vol. 61, no. 4, 2019, pp. 608–630.

• Verdi, Hayley. “Seasonal Cycles and the Emotions of Faith in Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862).” Victorian Poetry, vol. 62, no. 1, 2024, pp. 31–53.

Footnotes