Heroine of the Weekend

This weekend's Heroine is poet Christina Georgina Rossetti, who was born December 5, 1830 in London! (I love her long poem Goblin Market, which I first encountered in a college poetry class, and one of her poems, In the bleak midwinter, was used to create one of my favorite Christmas songs, set by Gustav Holst...)

Rossetti was born in London and educated at home by her mother, Frances Polidori (sister of Byron's physician and author of The Vampyre, John Polidori). She came from a family of creative siblings, including her brother, pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian poet who sought asylum in England from political troubles in his native Naples. By the 1840s he was in physical and mental decline, and the family had severe financial difficulties, which led 14-year-old Christina to a nervous breakdown. This was followed by lifelong bouts of depression and illness.

During this time she and her mother and sister also became deeply interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement within the Church of England, a religious devotion that would play as much a part in her life as illness. Before she was 20, she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the founders of the pre-Raphaelite movement, but this ended when he reverted to Roman Catholicism. Later she became involved with linguist Charles Cayley, but they also did not marry because of religious reasons. She volunteered to work at the St. Mary Magdalene charity house in Highgate (a refuge for former prostitutes) between 1859 and 1870.

She served as a model for some of her brother's painting, including the Virgin Mary in 1848's The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, and the Annunciation in Ecce Ancilla Domini. She began writing at age 7, but had to wait until she was all of 18 to be published, when her poem appeared in the Athenaeum magazine. She sometimes contributed to the pre-Raphaelite magazine "The Germ," and her most famous work, Goblin Market and Other Poems, appeared when she was 31 in 1862. Goblin Market, which gathered much critical praise, seems at first a simple fairy-tale about 2 girls' misadventures among the goblins, but closer look reveals its many complex layers and meanings. Sometimes it's seen as an allegory about salvation and temptation; a commentary about Victorian gender roles and erotic desire.

She later concentrated on devotional and children's poetry and writings, and throughout her life maintained a large circle of friends and volunteer work. Jan Marsh writes, "she was opposed to war, slavery (in the American South), cruelty to animals, the exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution and all forms of military aggression."

In her later life she suffered from Graves' Disease and in 1893 developed cancer. She died in December 1894 and was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

One of her best known works is this: "When I am dead my dearest, sing no sad song for me, Plant thou no roses at my head, nor shady cypress tree. See the green grass above me with showers and dewdrops wet, And if thou wilt remember, and if thou wilt, forget. I shall not see the shadows, I shall not feel the rain, I shall not hear the nightingale sing on as if in pain. And dreaming throughout the twilight that doth not rise nor set, Hap'ly will remember, and happily will forget."

A few good sources on Rossetti's life and work are:
Jan Marsh, Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life (1994)
David Clifford and Laurence Roussillon, Outsiders Looking in: The Rossettis Then and Now (2004)
Kathleen Jones, Learning Not to be First: A Biography of Christina Rossetti (1991)