Christina Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti, one the most famous women poets during the nineteenth-century, was born on December 5, 1830 and died in 1894. Referring to the title of George Gissing’s 1893 novel about women who choose not to marry, the critic Jerome McGann calls Christina Rossetti “one of the nineteenth-century England’s greatest ‘Odd Women’ (“Christina Rossetti” 1459). She “was encouraged to develop an early love for art and literature and to draw and write poetry from a very early age”, just like her brothers Dante Gabriel and William Michael (“Christina Rossetti” 1459). Though never married, in 1848 she was engaged to James Collinson, but the engagement fell through after James reverted to his upbringings of Roman Catholicism. Both a devout Christian and admired poet, Rossetti is very traditional. This is seen through her poetry, which are known to be suspenseful. All her works came together as a mixture of her experience, religion, and advocacy womens’ rights. It is obvious that “Rossetti uses irony to both protect and display herself; she seems to deploy a double perspective on herself [and other subjects]” (Robinson 49). In her work, she uses “gendered stereotypes” with both men and women (Robinson 49). Christina Rossetti maintained an “active participation in the new [Victorian] developments in aesthetics, theology, science, economics, and politics” (Robinson 49). In her first volume of poetry, “Goblin Market and Other Poems” (1862), all the different poetic modes that mark her achievement are complied: pure lyric, narrative fable, ballad, and the devotional verse to which she increasingly turned to during her later years” (“Christina Rossetti” 1460). Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar call her “an aesthetics of renunciation” (“Christina Rossetti” 1460). Some could justify comparisons between Rossetti and Dickson by the fashion in which “she wrote many poems of an extraordinarily pure lyric beauty” (“Christina Rossetti”). Christina Rossetti, no doubt is a strong, independent, feminist poet, who wrote what she thought and believed in her heart to be true.



Works Cited:
Robinson, B. J. "Essays on Christina Rossetti." English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920 44.1 (2001): 86-89. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 27 Apr. 2011
"Christina Rossetti." The Norton Anthology: English literature. 8. E. New York: W. W. Nortonv& Company, 2006. Print.

Picture Citation:
http://jennybeans.net/goblin-market/