Learning Not to be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti

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 Christinas passionate nature was curbed in a way that her brothers 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 Marias 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. Christinas deliberate self-effacement Dante Gabriels portrayal of her as the meek virgin and William Rossettis 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 Christinas life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers - notably Emily Brontë Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson.