CHRISTINA ROSSETTI: Learning Not to Be First

This biography is a fresh and illuminating study of Christina Rossetti and her poetry. Kathleen Jones looks at her life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers - notably Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson. 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', Christina's passionate nature was curbed in a way that her brother's 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 Maria's 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. The loneliness of the unloved was her particular province. As her personal life became increasingly tragic, her output of religious poetry grew. Her desire for poetic excellence and moral excellence were continually in conflict and her poetry betrays the corrosive effect of this struggle. Christina's deliberate self-effacement, Dante Gabriel's portrayal of her as the meek virgin and William Rossetti's role as editor and interpreter of her work have gradually blotted out the passionate lively spirit who wrote with such simplicity and power. Learning Not To Be First strips away the suffocating shadows of Christina Rossetti's life to reveal her true self.