PENGUIN CLASSICS

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI: SELECTED POEMS

CHRISTINA ROSSETTI was born in London in 1830 to a literary and artistic family of Italian origin, and was educated at home. When she was sixteen, her grandfather printed a collection of her poems, convinced that they were worthy of publication. She became engaged in 1848 to James Collinson, an early member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which her brothers Dante Gabriel and William Michael were among the founders. The engagement ended in 1850 on Collinson’s conversion to Roman Catholicism, which clashed with Christina’s High Anglicanism. Her father retired in 1853 and Christina planned to open a day school to earn money. This plan was eventually abandoned because of ill-health, which required her to live quietly.

In 1850 several of her poems had been published under a pseudonym in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ. More of her poems appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1861, of which ‘Uphill’ and ‘A Birthday’ received considerable critical praise. Christina went on to publish several collections of poetry, including Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862). She also published verse for children, including Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872, illustrated by Arthur Hughes), short stories, prose-works, including a commentary on the Apocalypse, and a number of devotional works. A devout Anglican, she was drawn to the Tractarian or Oxford Movement, and much of her writing was religious in theme, with a strong sense of spiritual yearning and melancholy. She also wrote about the frustrations and renunciation of love and in 1866 rejected a proposal of marriage from Charles Cayley, on the grounds that he was not a Christian. From then on she lived somewhat reclusively, although continuing to write and to meet her brothers’ friends, whose circle included Whistler, Swinburne and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She died in 1894.

DINAH ROE is a lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire and a freelance writer whose interests include the nineteenth-century novel, Victorian poetry, and women’s writing. Born and raised in the United States, she holds degrees from Vassar College (USA) and University College London. She has written Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination (2006), and is currently working on a book about the Rossetti family and their circle. She lives in London.