Biography of Christina Rossetti

Her life and family

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.

She was the youngest of four children; two girls and two boys. She came from one of the most interesting families in Victorian England. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a poet who had to flee Italy for political reasons. He fled to London where he eventually became Professor of Italian at Kings College, London University. Her mother was a Polidori, one of her brothers became Lord Byron's physician. Her brother was the poet and artist, Dante Rossetti.

Christina was brought up in the Church of England. Her father had been Catholic but allowed the children to be brought up as Anglicans. She was very devoted to her religion.

In 1843 her father became ill and had to give up his job. It was then up to her mother to support the family. Christina's older sister, Maria, became a governess, and her brother, William became a government clerk. Dante by then was already an artist. Christina also thought she would become a governess but her health would not allow it. Her mother started a day-school where Christina helped when she could.

In 1848, James Collinson, a painter of her brother's group of artists, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, proposed marriage to Christina. She turned him down because he had recently converted to Catholicism. He reverted to Anglicanism and proposed again, she agreed. Two years later he again became Catholic and she broke off the engagement.

When she was 17, her grandfather Polidori, printed some of Christina's poems on his private printing press. She contributed some poems under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne in a publication called The Germ, a Pre-Raphaelite literary journal, in 1850.

In 1853, Christina's mother gave up the day-school which had never been much of a success and tried to start another school in Somerset, however, this failed too. In 1854, her brother, William, brought the family back to London to live with him. However, her father Gabriele died soon after. To earn a little extra money, Christina wrote dictionary articles and ...

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Lizzie Siddall, Christina's sister-in-law, tried to get her to produce a volume of her works. Eventually, in 1861, she began to prepare her poems for publication.

Her first book, the Goblin Market and Other Poems, was eventually published in 1862 and was a great success. In 1866, she published The Prince's Progress and Other Poems. These two books established her as one of the great poets of the day.

In 1870, she published a prose work, Commonplace and Other Short Stories. She also wrote Sing-Song: a Nursery Rhyme Book which was among the best children's books of the 19th century.

After rejecting Cayley in 1866, according one biographer, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously in the lives of other people.

Christina developed Graves' disease in 1871, a thyroid disorder that is said to have altered her appearance. She still continued to publish. In 1873, her sister Maria became an Anglican nun. Christina issued one volume of poems in 1875 and A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881. However, after the onset of her disease, Christina mostly concentrated on prose writings. Her brother, Dante, died in 1882. And, in 1886, her mother died. After this, Christina cared for two elderly aunts until they died. She didn't publish any more poetry but did continue to write.

In 1891, Christina was considered to replace Alfred, Lord Tennyson, as poet laureate. However, she developed a fatal cancer. She was operated on successfully in 1892. She lived the next two years of her life as an invalid and died on December 29, 1894.

Her poems

Partly because of her shyness and partly just because she was a woman, Christina Rossetti was never completely a part of the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood. Nevertheless, her Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) was the first unalloyed literary success the Brotherhood enjoyed, and there is a loose parallel between her fondness for the rhythms of folk songs and the Pre-Raphaelite interest in things medieval. Since she began with such success, both her brother and her publisher were eager that she follow it up at once, but her next volume of poetry, The Prince's Progress and Other Poems, was not ready until 1866. It sold well, but the critics saw at once that the best poems in it were not quite the equal of the best in her first collection. In fact, "Goblin Market," one of her first poems, remains her best.

Themes of frustrated love and an understated tension between desire and renunciation characterise her more serious work.

Separated lovers often appear in her poems, and regret for life unfulfilled alternates with what one critic calls a death wish.

But there is another strain in some of her poetry that can be called Gothic or even macabre--goblins, serpents, wombats, and lizards turn up in her verses.

The tension between what she was and what she thought she should be exhausted Rossetti. Physical as well as spiritual distress played its part; throughout most of her life she was a sick woman. She longs for rest so intensely that she thinks of death as blessed oblivion rather than as blessed gateway:

Rest, rest; the troubled breast
Panteth evermore for rest:--
Be it sleep or be it death
Rest is all it coveteth.

Rossetti wrote many seasonal poems, including two entitled "Autumn," one in 1853 and one in 1858.

Christina Rossetti fell in love twice in her life. The first time with James Collinson, then later with Charles Cayley. None of her poems to Collinson reflects joy or hope. On the contrary, at the height of her love for him she wrote some of her most poignant lines on the imminence and the pathos of death. Two of her most famous poems come from this time, and in each Christina is obsessed by thoughts of death. In "Remember" she asks her beloved to remember her when she is dead, because that is all that he will be able to do for her. Then, with characteristic humility, she assures him that even this is not necessary and that all she asks is that he himself should not be unhappy:

Yet if you should forget me for awile
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that I once had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad

In Christina love released a melancholy desire for death, she felt that the claims of love were not for her, that her way of life was unsuited to it, and that she must go back to her old denials and refusals. It is not surprising that, being the victim of such a struggle, she sometimes felt it was too much for her and she could not bear it endure longer. At such times she would long for release and find no magic even in the spring;

I wish I were dead, my foe,
My friend, I wish I were dead,
With a stone at my tired feet
With a stone at my head.

In the pleasant April days
Half the world will stir and sing,
But half the world will slug and rot
For all the sap of Spring

Much of Christina Rossetti's poetry is filled with a homesick love of spring, the season of a promise ever lovelier than its own fulfilment. Longing for "the limpid days"

There is no time like Spring,
Like Spring that passes by;
There is no life like Spring life born to die,-
Piercing the sod,
Clothing the uncouth clod,
Hatched in the nest,
Fledged on the windy bough,
Strong on the wing:
There is no time like Spring that passes by,
Now newly born, and now
Hastening to die.

There, for Christina, lies one of the central human tragedies. We let youth slip from us regardless of its treasures; the theme of lost opportunity, of joys unvalued until they have been snatched away forever, runs through the poems from The Prince's Progress onwards.

Obvious themes for Goblin Market might be "that one should be careful of temptation," or "that little girls should not talk to strange men." One might even go on to the end of the poem and decide the theme is "that sisters should love one another." If you look more deeply it has many other themes and bible references, it also attempts to deal with certain problems Rossetti recognized within the canon of English literature, and specifically with the problem of how to construct a female hero.

Seeking solace in religion was Christina Rossetti's solution to her unfulfilled longing for a child. It is hinted at in Sing-Song but becomes even more distinctive in her religious poetry. She could not find a partner in real life. Therefore, she turned her hopes towards life after death. There, she hoped to find an end to what she describes as her 'infertility' as well as a husband, she looked towards Jesus Christ.