Born in London to a family of an Italian exile, Christina Rossetti is one of the best loved female poets of the 19th century. Rossetti was born in 1830, the youngest of four children. Her father, Gabriele Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti, was a Dante scholar and taught at King’s College. Her mother, Frances Mary Lavinia, was the sister of John William Polidori, Byron’s physician and the author of The Vamyre.
The makings of a poet
Christina’s older siblings—Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, and William—all became writers and artists in their own right. The fertile ground of the Rossetti home included visiting Italian scholars. Petrarch and Dante were ever-present in the home, and Christina’s parents educated her in the home with a focus on classics and fairytales.
Biographies suggest, “As a young girl she was vivacious, even (according to her own report) short-tempered; the children were characterized by their father as being two storms—Christina and Gabriel—and two calms—Maria and William.” Christina was prone from a young age to episodes of ill health, which would plague her throughout her life.
She showed promise in writing from an early age, apparently dictating a story to her mother before she could write and having her poems published on the private printing press of her grandfather, Gaetano Polidori.
The family was in perpetual economic hardship, which was exacerbated by her father’s increasingly frail health. Christina dreaded the prospect of becoming a governess to help support the family, a fate she avoided due to her continual frailty and health complications. Amid this turmoil, Christina developed fervent religious conviction as a High Church Anglican and devoted herself to caring for her mother and her craft as a poet.
Christina rejected at least three marriage proposals, immortalizing one rejection in verse leading some to dub her the Taylor Swift of Victorian England. Her spinsterhood was not accidental, and, in part, allowed her to hone her skill as a poet, for which she showed great aptitude from a young age.
Her work and inspiration
In 1850, Christina submitted seven poems under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne to the Pre-Raphaelite publication The Germ. The Pre-Raphaelites, a group of which her brother Dante Gabriel was a founding member, were an artistic collective of artists and poets who advocated a return to artwork that displayed fidelity to reality.
That same year, The Germ included an explanation of the Pre-Raphaelites’ artistic project:
The endeavour held in view throughout the writings on Art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to the simplicity of nature; and also to direct attention, as an auxiliary medium, to the comparatively few works which Art has yet produced in this spirit.
Christina’s poetry adhered to this “truth to nature.” Covering a wide range of human experience, from childhood whimsy to rejected lovers, Rossetti’s poems have grown in appreciation. In her lifetime, she received acclaim for collections like Goblin Market and Other Poems.
Enduring legacy
In the years since her death, some of Rossetti’s poems have been set to music, including the well-known Christmas carols In the Bleak Midwinter and Love Came Down at Christmas. The simple themes of much of her poetry paired with a command of verse and meter have continued to make Rossetti’s poems favorites for children’s collections.
