When was christina rossetti born

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Reblogged this on Recommended book and blog news, poetry and tarot inspiration and commented: A much admired, by me, poet who deserves more recognition Loading Subscribe via Email Enter your email address to subscribe to this site and receive notifications of new posts by email. Interesting Literature. Privacy Policy. Robert Bridges. Lewis Carroll Renowned Victorian author Lewis Carroll is known for his comic fantasies and humorous, childlike Edward Lear The British poet Edward Lear's poems can be characterized by his irreverent view of the world.

He enrolled in Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. Jobs for Poets. Read Stanza. Privacy Policy. Press Center. First Book Award. James Laughlin Award. Ambroggio Prize. There is little record of her acquaintance with Charles Dodgson Lewis Carroll , Barbara Bodichon , or Algernon Swinburne , who admired her poetry greatly, and she seems to have avoided meeting Tennyson and Walt Whitman , both of whom were known to her brothers.

Little can be learned about her reactions to such episodes as the death of Gabriel's wife after an overdose of laudanum in , nor to his mental collapse and suicide attempts in Her relationship with Lucy , the sociable daughter of Ford Madox Brown and an exhibited painter, was uneasy, particularly after Lucy married William in , although she later derived pleasure from their children, who have provided accounts of Aunt Christina's piety, and her grimness and rectitude.

It is hard to avoid the impression that, as time went on, her life steadily became more and more melancholy. Maria , who had become an Anglican nun shortly after William's marriage, died of cancer in ; Gabriel in and her mother in ; and Charles Cayley in After William and Lucy and their family moved to Primrose Hill, London, in , she shared the house at 30 Torrington Square with her two very elderly Polidori aunts.

On 29 December she died there in great pain and anguish, of cancer, having undergone surgery two years earlier. She was buried on 2 January in Highgate cemetery, Middlesex, in the Rossetti family tomb, which, notoriously, had been opened in October so that Gabriel could retrieve a volume of poems he had buried with his wife.

Although her literary status was never as high as Elizabeth Barrett Browning's during her life, Christina Rossetti's posthumous reputation has remained strong and is increasing; she stands far above her popular, prolific contemporaries Dora Greenwell , Adelaide Proctor , and Jean Ingelow. In the twentieth century a great interest has been taken in Freudian interpretations of poems such as 'Goblin Market' , and her work, which was previously admired for its innocence and artlessness, has become a hunting-ground for critics and biographers; enlisted as a symbol of repressed female genius, she has had her work scanned for tropes of starvation and sexual guilt.

In Christina Rossetti's case her pious scrupulousness seems at odds with the heartfelt emotion expressed in her poetry. Earlier admirers were anxious to promote her as a wholly Christian writer, as seen, for instance, in Mackenzie Bell's reverent Christina Rossetti , William Michael Rossetti's congenitally careful 'Memoir' prefaced to his edition of her Poetical Works , and Katharine Tynan's hagiographical 'Santa Christina' Later twentieth-century biographers, however, have tended to make more intimate moves and have sought to decode the writings in terms of a personal romantic disappointment.

And so Lona Mosk Packer's biography puts forward the theory that the poetry was conceived around the poet's passionate, unrequited love for the painter William Bell Scott , a family friend. Georgina Battiscombe , in Christina Rossetti: a Divided Life , presents her interpretation of a woman torn between religious observance and artistic rebellion. In her biography Frances Thomas suggests that her collapses were, in fact, periods of insanity whose recurrence she dreaded and which led to her circumscribed life.

Most controversially, perhaps, Jan Marsh's Christina Rossetti: a Literary Biography presents her belief that the breakdown in and the strange imagery in some of the stories and poems was possibly due to sexual abuse by her father, when as a teenager she was left to look after him alone. The interest in Christina Rossetti's life has led to a renewed evaluation of her work, which now is seen as going beyond the familiar lyric sweetness of poems such as 'My heart is like a singing bird' , 'When I am dead, my dearest' , and 'In the bleak midwinter' , towards an appreciation of her gifts of versification and her strangely direct, assertive manner—so different from the muffled voice of her brother's poetry.

Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were both attracted to a sumptuous vocabulary of exotic fruit and gems and, as poets, they both favoured a kind of plangent melancholy. Christina Rossetti is more personal; she often employs a confrontational address, opening on a colloquial note:. Winter: my Secret. Shall I forget Her apparent lucidity and the strength of feeling in her work encourages biographical interpretation. The fair maidens and half-animal goblins of 'Goblin Market' seem to modern critics to be a cover for an erotic subtext with particular meanings for the poet herself.

The poem's images of sensuality and violation. Victorian readers, however, saw the work simply as a narrative poem for children. Since the variorum edition of Christina Rossetti's Complete Poems appeared in —90, a publication which made use of the manuscript notebooks in which the poems were copied, there have been dozens of reissues and reassessments which place her at the head of nineteenth-century women's writing, itself newly reassessed.

The view of Ford Madox Ford who was the son of Lucy Rossetti's sister Cathy that she was ' a modern writer ' is the one which stands. In an article to mark the centenary of her birth, Basil de Selincourt placed her as ' all but our greatest woman poet … incomparably our greatest craftswoman … probably in the first twelve of the masters of English verse ' TLS , 4 Dec The growth of her reputation is well illustrated by her increased representation in anthologies of Victorian poetry published throughout the twentieth century.

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Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Search within Show Summary Details. Rossetti, Christina Georgina — Childhood and illnesses Christina Rossetti's childhood—to judge from her brother William's reminiscences and from the blithe tone of her children's verse—was happy. The Pre-Raphaelites In her late teens Christina Rossetti became involved in a group of her brothers' painting friends—among them Ford Madox Brown , William Holman Hunt , and John Everett Millais —and she was, emotionally at least, involved in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood , whose dissolution in she marked with some sprightly comic verses.

In one much quoted account, in a letter to William in , she is characteristically sliding out of the picture: Think of my dismay; today I met Mr Hunt on the stairs; and actually not knowing him, ran past without exchanging greetings. Letters of Christina Rosetti , 1. Suitors rejected Collinson was the first of Christina Rossetti's three suitors. I never said I loved you John : Why will you teaze me day by day.

Further ill health Christina Rossetti's appearance at this time—pale, narrow-jawed, with large-lidded eyes and long, uncurled hair—might be seen as a prototype for the introspective, melancholy Pre-Raphaelite female, a look which later went through many exaggerations in her brother Gabriel's paintings.