Christina (Georgina) Rossetti - Works
Poet, born in London, UK, the daughter of Gabriele Rossetti. A devout Anglican, and influenced by the Oxford Movement, she wrote mainly religious poetry, such as Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). By the 1880s, recurrent bouts of illness had made her an invalid, but she continued to write, later works including A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) and The Face of the Deep (1892). Her work displays the influence of the Pre-Raphaelite artistic movement, which her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, helped to found.
Christina Georgina Rossetti (December 5, 1830 – December 29, 1894) was an English poet and the sister of artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti as well as William Michael Rossetti and Maria Francesca Rossetti. Their father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian poet and a political asylum seeker from Naples, and their mother, Frances Polidori, was the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician, John William Polidori.
Rossetti was born in London and educated at home by her mother. When she was 14, Rossetti herself suffered a nervous breakdown, which in succeeding years was followed by periodic bouts of depression and related illness. During this period of Rossetti's life, she, along with her mother and sister, became seriously invested in the Anglo-Catholic movement that was part of the Church of England, and this religious devotion played a major role in Rossetti's personal life for the rest of her life.
Although Rossetti began writing at an early age, her poetry didn't gain notice until the publication of Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862. The collection garnered much critical praise, and according to Jan Marsh, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning's death two months later led to Rossetti being hailed as her natural successor as 'female laureate'." The title poem from this book is Rossetti's best known work. Although upon first glance it may seem merely to be a nursery rhyme about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, the poem is multi-layered, challenging, and complex, and critics have interpreted the piece in a variety of ways, seeing it as an allegory about temptation and salvation, a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency, a work about erotic desire and social redemption.
During the remainder of her life, Rossetti continued to write and publish, although she focused primarily on devotional writing and children's poetry.
In 1893 Rossetti contracted cancer. In the early 20th century Rossetti's popularity faded, as many respected Victorian writers' reputations suffered from Modernism's backlash. Rossetti remained largely unnoticed and unread until the 1970s when feminist scholars began to recover and write on her work. In the last few decades, Rossetti's writing has been rediscovered, and she has regained admittance into the Victorian literary canon.
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