Christina was the youngest of the four Rossetti children, born in England to Italian parents. Although she and her brother, the artist Dante Gabriel, were known as the ‘two storms’, Christina’s passionate nature was curbed in a way that her brother’s was not, as she submitted to the social and religious pressures that lay so heavily on Victorian women. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she suffered the tyranny of a loving family. Her sister Maria’s influence was described as ‘a species of police surveillance’, and Christina was always careful never to write anything that would hurt her mother. Often referred to as the ‘High Priestess of Pre-Raphaelitism’ Christina had a genuine lyric gift that could articulate both the joy of being alive and the bitterness of loss. Her desire for poetic excellence and moral excellence were continually in conflict and her poetry betrays the corrosive effect of this struggle. Christina’s deliberate self-effacement, Dante Gabriel’s portrayal of her as the meek virgin and William Rossetti’s subjective role as editor and interpreter of her work have gradually blotted out the passionate lively spirit who wrote ‘Goblin Market’ – one of the most complex and disturbing poems ever written. Kathleen Jones looks at Christina’s life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers – notably Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson.
Table of Content
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Part One: Pricked to a Pattern
Part Two: Renunciation
Part three: Just A Fairy Story
Part Four: Tenacious Obscurity
References
Bibliography
About the author
Kathleen Jones is a Sunday Times best-selling novelist, biographer and poet living in the English Lake District. She is the author of more than fifteen books and is currently a Royal Literary Fund Fellow.
Born and brought up on a small hill farm she spent more than ten years living in Africa and the Middle East, where she worked in English broadcasting. Her work has won a number of important prizes. ‘A Passionate Sisterhood’ (Virago) won the Barclays Bank Prize for Biography and her recent collection of poetry, ‘Not Saying Goodbye at Gate 21’ (Templar Poetry) won the Straid Award. Kathleen’s biography of Catherine Cookson (Times Warner) was in the top 10 bestseller lists for more than 8 weeks. She now lives in an old mill beside one of northern England’s major rivers and is a passionate environmentalist.
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