On 5th December 1830, Christina Rossetti was born in London. She was one of the four offspring of Italian guardians. Her father was the artist Gabriele Rossetti. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was her brother and he turned into an artist and a painter. Rossetti’s first sonnets were written in 1842 and imprinted in her granddad’s private press. In 1850, under the pseudonym Alleyne, she contributed seven sonnets to the Pre-Raphaelite diary ‘The Germ’, which had been established by her sibling William Michael and his companions.

Rossetti is best known for her ballads and her mystic religious lyrics, and her poetry is marked by symbolism and intense feeling. Rossetti’s best-known work, Goblin Market and Other Poems were published in 1862. The collection established Rossetti as a significant voice in Victorian poetry. ‘The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems’ appeared in 1866 followed by Sing-Song, a collection of verse for children, in 1872 (with illustrations by Arthur Hughes).

By the 1880s, repetitive episodes of Graves’ illness finished Rossetti’s endeavours to serve as a tutor. The disease limited her public activity. She kept on composing poetic works despite her disease for example, ‘A Pageant and Other Poems’ in 1881. Rossetti likewise composed religious prose works, for example, ‘Seek and Find’ in 1879, ‘Called To Be Saints’ in 1881 and ‘The Face of the Deep’ in 1892. 

In 1891, Rossetti was diagnosed with cancer and she ultimately died of it. She died in London 29th December 1894. Rossetti’s sibling, William Michael, altered her gathered works in 1904. However, the Complete Poems were not circulated in a book form before 1979.

A Short Biography of Christina Rossetti

Christina Georgina Rossetti was born on December 5, 1830. Her birthplace is Charlotte Street, London. This street is known as Hallam Street today. Her parents were Italian. Christina was the youngest child of the family. His father`s name was Gabriele. He was a supporter of the revolution of nationalism in Italy. For his support to revolution, Gabriele was exiled in 1824. He was a professor in Italian University. 

After the exile, Gabriele became a scholar in King’s College London. Christina`s mother’s name was Frances Rossetti. Frances was the sister of an author, John William Polidori. John William Polidori was the closest friend of Lord Byron.  Though Christina`s father believed in Catholicism, her mother brought up her children under the teaching of Anglican Church. Christina had two brothers and sisters.

 

Christian got her early education at home. Her parents had a deep study of classics, religious studies and all fairy tales. She was given guidance in all the subjects and this encouraged her to pursue her writings as a poet.

All these siblings had an artistic sense. Her brother Dante Gabriel was a famous poet and a painter. Maria Francesca composed work about Dente Alighieri. Later on, Maria became an Anglican nun. William Michael became a critic, writer and also one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

Because of family background, Christina met different scholars, authors and artists. At a very young age, Christina`s parents started to polish her literary skills. She was taught about religious and classical literature. She also studied different famous literary figures. Christina was more close to her mother. Her first published poems were entitled ‘To My Mother.’ She composed this work when she was only 11 years old.

The Rossettis moved from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic direction to make up for a lost time in the Tractarian or Oxford movement when it arrived at London during the 1840s. This standpoint impacted all of Christina Rossetti’s verses. She was affected by the poetics of the Oxford Movement. She reported this in the comments and outlines she added to hercopy of John Keble’s ‘The Christian Year’ (1827) and another of poetry by Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman. For over twenty years, starting in 1843, she paid reverence to God at Christ Church, Albany Street, where administrations were impacted by the developments radiating from Oxford.

The Reverend William Dodsworth accepted the main job as the Oxford Movement spread to London. Besides going under the religious impact of unmistakable Tractarians Rossetti had close connections with Burrows and Richard Frederick Littledale, a High Church scholar who turned into her profound consultant. The significance of Rossetti’s confidence for her life and workmanship can barely be exaggerated. 

The greater part of her beautiful yield is reverential, and crafted by her later years in both verse and exposition are solely so. The changeability of human love, the vanity of natural joys, renunciation, singular disgracefulness, and the flawlessness of perfect love are repeating topics in her verse.

In 1843, Christina`s father was diagnosed with a serious disease of tuberculosis. This was a hard time for Christina`s family. Her father left King’s College. This made the family suffer in terms of finances. Her father lived for the next 11 years but the family remained in high depression during these times. In 1854, her father died. After her father’s death, Christina`s family started working. During these times, her mother had to teach so that the family could be fed. Her sister worked as live-in governess Christina was around 14 years old when she started the bouts of a nervous breakdown due to these calamitous situations. She had to quit her schooling in such a scenario.

In this scenario, Christina developed an isolated personality. She became a shy girl. Christina faced mental as well as physical illness in those days. She became a depressed girl. In these melancholic days, she started composing poetry. She expressed her disturbing thoughts and religious life through poetry.

When Christina was seventeen years old, she got engaged to James Collinson. As Christina had a love for Anglican teachings, she left Collinson for his Catholic thoughts in 1850. Christina rejected a second proposal for religious issues. In the harvest time of 1866, Rossetti declined a proposal of marriage from Charles Bagot Cayley. Cayley had started contemplating Italian with her father in 1847, sharing the Rossettis’ excitement for Dante and charming himself to them with his visits during their father’s last disease. A reluctant sentiment relationship started to create among Rossetti and him around 1862.

Rossetti’s explanations behind dismissing his proposition must be gathered. In a note, her brother William says that she turned Cayley down on grounds of religious confidence. At the time, William imagined that there may be budgetary deterrents to the association and offered the couple a spot in his family; his sister reacted on 11 September 1866. Much is obscure about the connection among Cayley and Rossetti. In his diary, William noticed that Christina was amazingly hesitant in all issues in which her expressions of love were profoundly drawn in. Cayley and Rossetti stayed close until his passing in 1883, and Rossetti filled in as his literary agent.

In 1848, her two poems entitled ‘Death’s Chill Between and Heart`s Chill Between’ were published in ‘The Athenaeum’ magazine. When Pre-Raphaelite emerged, she started her publications in ‘The Germ’. Christina was also a member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. Her personality was the inspiration of Dante’s many paintings. In 1849, Dante painted ‘The Girlhood of Mary Virgin’. The next year he painted ‘Ecce Ancilla Domini’. Christina also worked in painting, but she was famous for her poetry.

In Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, through her themes, symbolism, medieval touch and gothic essence, she made a distinct position. In 1850, a biographical novel ‘Maude’ was composed. This novel explained the teenage difficulties of Christina. ‘Maude’ got publication after three years of her death. In 1851, Christina’s family again faced financial issues. Her family moved to Camden Town from Charlotte Street. Christina and her mother started a small school. They tried twice to establish a school. 

In 1853, Rossetti`s family made home outside London. When they returned, they started living in Albany Street. They left the idea of school. On 26th April 1850, Gabriele Rossetti died. Mostly, Christina took financial help from William.

In 1854, Christina decided to join the mission of Florence Nightingale, but it could not happen. In 1859, Christina worked as a volunteer at St. Mary Magdalene Penitentiary. She served humanity and became Sister Christina. During the 50s Christina published different poems. In 1856, she published short stories entitled, ‘The Lost Titan’. In 1859, she published ‘Maude Clare’. In 1862, her publication of poems got appreciation from critics. ‘Goblin Market’ became a famous poem. In 1866, another collection of her poems appeared. Christina also tried her hand in Fairy Tales but she never succeeded.

In 1871, Grave’s disease was diagnosed. In 1872, she published a nursery rhyme. She also published ‘Speaking Likenesses’, a children’s book. In 1894, she became a breast cancer patient. Christina died on December 29, 1894. Her body was buried in High gate Cemetery.

She was the most important member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. During her lifetime, Christina was quite an appreciated poetess. Today, her works are acknowledged by many scholars and feminist Critique, which shows her importance in the 20th century.

Christina Rossetti’s Writing Style

Romanticism

Christina Rosetti was a poet who lived during the Victorian time in England. She was a sentimental artist, composing verses that were affected by the sentimental and expressive components. Rossetti mostly composed poetic work implied for youngsters.

While her primary work reflected religious topics, there were inconspicuous adult hints to a portion of her increasingly acclaimed poems like “Troll Market.” The impact of romanticism and sentimentalism is clear in her work. They are explicitly in her consideration regarding characteristic excellence and the autonomous idea of the characters that show up in her work.

Feminist Perspectives

She sought feminism and her writings are an explicit example of feminist writing. This wave of feminist perspective became a strong model of her writing and she gave vent to her feminist perspectives in the majority of her works. The autonomy of female characters specifically has driven some to portray Rossetti as a women’s activist poet.

In spite of the fact that Rossetti would have likely been new to the possibility of ladies’ strengthening, her female characters don’t fit into the ideal Victorian shape that society directed for ladies at that point. Rossetti’s ladies were free and valiant, and they sought after the things that they wanted to the exclusion of everything else.

Inculcating Moral Lessons

Rossetti’s sonnets show a worry with individual salvation instead of social change. Keeping in touch with Dante Gabriel in April 1870, she pronounced that it isn’t in her and along these lines it will never come out of her, to go to legislative issues or magnanimity with Mrs Browning. The issues as such many-sidedness she leaves are more noteworthy than she and having said her state may well sit quietly. ‘The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems’ lay incredible accentuation on the brevity of this life, a common subject in the Rossetti ordinance.

The exercise to be gained from many of her poems is that every single natural thing is problematic, fanciful, and passing. Certainly appeared differently in relation to the transient nature of this life is the changelessness of God and the wonderful prize. With its correlation of human and heavenly love, “Twice” is a trademark explanation of this subject. 

The speaker first offers her heart to her sweetheart, who, with an agreeable grin and critical eye, sets it aside as unripe. The speaker at that point offers the wrecked heart to God, with the supplication.  The disappointment of human love is a keynote in the volume, starting with the title sonnet and showing up again in “Jessie Cameron,” and many other of her works.

Highlighting Gender Roles

In many of her poems, Christina has talked about the gender roles and their division to basic feminine rights. She goes to the extent to pose questions on the biological advancements and divisions of genders as well. In the same way as other of Rossetti’s sonnets, her reverential works are twofold edged blades of accommodation and attestation. While they encourage submission to celestial will, they infringe into the generally male regions of philosophical examination, scriptural exposition, and profound direction.

Essentially, Rossetti’s perspectives on sexual orientation issues consolidate the traditionalist with the radical. Referring to scriptural instructions on the lady’s subjection to man, Rossetti had kept in touch with the artist Augusta Webster in 1878. Augusta accepted that the most elevated capacities are not in this world open to both genders, she was unable to sign a request for ladies’ testimonial. She went on to recommend that testimonial isn’t sufficient to ensure ladies’ inclinations and that female portrayal in Parliament would be increasingly reliable with the points of the ladies’ development.

She likewise contended for the courageous prospects of maternal love and its capability to clear away the obstruction of sex. It isn’t exceptional to discover such hints of rebelliousness in Rossetti’s evidently preservationist articulations on sexual orientation jobs. An all conversation of the subject in ‘Seek and Find’ starts with a very conventional conversation of a lady as a lesser light—a moon to man’s sun. In any case, Rossetti at that point moves from an announcement about the ladylike part being one of compliance to a passage long examination between the feminine roles. It is the position that Christ deliberately accepted on earth, and she finishes with a levelling of sex progressions.

Religious Dimensions

It is little shock at that point that quite a bit of Rossetti’s verses has solid religious perspectives. A significant number of her poems are plainly worried about religious issues and it is reasonable to contend that all her work, even what appears to manage progressively common concerns, has a reverberating religious or otherworldly drive. Rossetti was seen as an incredibly profound author in her own day and came to be seen as one of the extraordinary religious writers of the age. However, Rossetti’s religion is rarely basic or unquestioning. Her compositions show her continually grilling religious thoughts and convictions, frequently with a level of pressure and tension.

The speakers of Rossetti’s poetic works over and again battle with religious uncertainty, dissatisfaction and dread. They look for a consolation that may never come or endeavour to comprehend their feeling of prohibition from God or Christ. Composed when setting up religious convictions were being tested by new improvements in science, Rossetti exhibits one manner by which a key Victorian author inspected the ambiguities of confidence in a period of significant change. This was the era when especially the hypothesis of development as it progressed in Charles Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ (1859) and ‘The Descent of Man’ (1871) were shattering the belief system of human faith and development.

Repercussions of Worldly Attachment

Rossetti had been in constant touch with religious fervour. It is because of her religious attachment that she had to reject a number of marriage proposals. Thus this became a striking character in her writing to aware the audience about the negative consequences of worldly attachment. In the poem ‘The World’, Rossetti portrays the unfortunate outcomes of being attached to common joys as opposed to recalling the significance of profound dedication. 

The world here is introduced as an alluring yet fatal female figure, a sort of femme fatale. During the day ‘The World’ is enticingly excellent and charms the speaker’s spirit with ripe natural products, sweet blossoms, and full satiety. It is a symbolism which reviews the natural product on offer in the; Goblin Market.’ However, around evening time, she is uncovered in all the exposed ghastliness of reality as Medusa-like, inconspicuous snakes skimming in her hair. Being joined to this colossal fleeting world will remove her from God and leave her dreading for her unfading life. For as she says, in a language which stresses the dread of being transformed into a fallen angel-like figure:

Is this a friend indeed; that I should sell

   My soul to her, give her my life and youth,

Till my feet, cloven too, take hold on hell? (ll. 12–14)

‘The World’ is an unnerving poem in which Rossetti stresses the need to oppose being taken in by natural enticements. However, the way to religious salvation is never simple either. For instance, in ‘A Better Resurrection’, the speaker more than once accentuates her seclusion – ‘Look right, look left, I stay alone’ – and her distance from the everlasting slopes of God’s favour. As she says in the third verse, her life is like a messed up bowl which can’t hold one drop of water for my spirit, a picture of void and absence of profound manageability. 

However, in the last lines of the poem, there is an expectation of restoration and change as the speaker approaches Christ to turn the broken bowl of herself into a new thing:

Cast in the fire the perished thing,

Melt and remould it, till it be

A royal cup for Him my King:

O Jesus, drink of me. (ll. 21–24)

Gothic Style

The imagery and symbolism with the touches of dark atmosphere make Rossetti a true gothic writer and this is another characteristic of her writing style. Being a genuine Gothic poet, Rossetti invested quite a bit of her energy committed to the part of death. In “A Chilly Night”, the readers follow a speaker who gets up at the dead of night to stroll to the grid alone and watch for her the apparition of mother in the evening glow. 

She is desolate, her companions have all failed her here and there and she misses her dead mother. Different apparitions frequently visit her, however, she is likewise visited by her mom’s phantom that attempts to address her, yet fails as she can’t make any sounds. In the end, the phantoms all vanish, and the speaker is disregarded by the window grid.

As in “Shut Out”, the primary feeling that comes out of this work is forlornness and this depression is underscored in the second part as the speaker’s companions had flopped individually. They are in the speaker feeling nearer to the apparitions than companions that had developed cold. The phantoms show up in the third stanza.

Worthy of notice is that the apparitions cast no shadow, similarly as the soul in “Shut Out”, meaning that they don’t have substance or worth. They talk “without a voice” and make no different sounds, implying that they have no other effect on the speaker than the insignificant visual appearance. This shows they probably won’t be genuine as they could show up just to the speaker and accordingly not exist in all actuality.

Dark Moods

Rossetti`s writing is indulged in religious faith and moral lessons so the overall tone and mood of her writings are dark. Her writing style is mainly gothic and this is another reason for her dark moods in her works. It must be recognized, however, that there are a lot darker states of mind in Rossetti’s composition: specifically an inescapable anxious longing. This makes a frequenting reminiscent impact. 

Her decision of symbolism is capably convincing; her subject frequently an enthusiastic and otherworldly aching as opposed to the sentimental energy of ‘A Birthday’. In her concise verse, ‘Roses on a brier’ a seriously felt beautiful second is coordinated to the basically mysterious. A large number of her sonnets express a prophetically catastrophic tone – she looks past death to a reality that can’t be explained.

Style of Prose Writings

Christina Rossetti distributed nine volumes of prose writing and just five volumes of verses. By 1850 she had just finished her first novella and kept on composing and publishing prose through her long artistic profession. Her last and most driven volume of reverential writing was distributed two years before her demise in 1894.

Christina Rossetti’s prose composing was one of the significant exercises of her life. An investigation of her writing works uncovers a psyche in steady movement, mirroring the social, tasteful and religious issues of her time. At first, in her writing fiction, Rossetti works with the mainstream anecdotal structures and kinds accessible to her, testing them against her strict religious, lastly dismissing them. 

Developing enthusiasm for language and portrayal drives her to rethink Romantic epistemology and our relationship with the common world. She continues in her investigation with a point by point assessment of the sacred writings and the exercises she finds there, helped by Tractarian hypothesis and her insight into conventional protestant hermeneutics. She subjects a Romantic style to the thoroughness of Christian law and finds adjusted Coleridgean imagery inside Trinitarian philosophy.

In spite of the fact that her methodology takes after that of the Tractarians in its mix of conventional protestant hermeneutics and a Romantic hypothesis of observation, she goes further in her advancement of the image. Her speculative plan in her analysis on Revelation of a hermeneutical hypothesis dependent on emblematic types of recognition is forward-looking to a portion of the significant advancements in twentieth-century hermeneutics. 

It is particularly her anxiety with the job of morals in the creation and gathering of craftsmanship. At long last, her specific virtuoso lies in her caring worry for her neighbour, and her anxiety to offer back to her open all she has learnt, in a structure which they can comprehend and value.

Works Of Christina Rossetti