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Christina (Georgina) Rossetti

( 1830 -1894 )

Christina Rossetti was born in London. Her father was the poet Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), professor of Italian at King’s College from 1831. He resigned in 1845 because of blindness. Christina was educated at home by her mother, Frances Polidori, a former governess. She shared her parents’ interest in poetry and was portrayed in the paintings and drawings of the Pre-Raphaelites. Christina was the model for her brother’s picture The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (184Q), the first picture to be signed P.R.B.

Rossetti’s first verses were written in 1842 and printed by her grandfather’s private press. In .1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the short-lived Pre-Raphaclite journal The Germ, which was founded by her brother William and his friends. Rossetti’s deeply religious temperament moulded her melancholic writing. She was a devout High Anglican, much influenced by the Tractarians. Rossetti’s best-known work, Goblin Market And Other Poems, was published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in the Victorian poetry. The title poem is a cryptic fairy-tale and tells the story of two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, who are tempted to eat the fruit of the goblin men. After eating the fruit, Laura cannot see the goblins. They attack Lizzie, whose refusal has angered the goblins, and she saves her sister in an act of sacrifice. Laura, long-ing to taste again the fruit, licks the juices with which Lizzie is covered. “For there is no friend like a sister / In calm or stormy weather.” The Price’s Progress, And Other Poems, appeared in 1866. Sing Song, a Nursery rhyme book was illustrated by Arthur Hughes in 1872. Rossetti also wrote religious prose works, such as Seek And Find (1879), Called To Be Saints (1881) and The Face Of The Deep (1892). By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of Graves’ disease, a thyroid disorder, had made Rossetti an invalid, and ended her attempts to work as a governess. Her illness confined her to a quiet life, but she continued to write. Among her later works arc A Pageant And Other Poems (1881).

Rossetti’s brother, William Michael, edited her complete works in 1904. Her work has suffered from reductive interpretations, but she is increasingly reconsidered as a major Victorian poet. Typical of her poetic style are a songlike way with words and use of short, irregularly rhymed lines. She was considered a possible successor to Alfred Tennyson as poet laureate, but she developed a fatal cancer in 1891, and died in London on December 29, 1894.