Rossetti’s elder brother, William Michael, collected a large number of her poems for The Poetical Works (1904), organizing them, rather idiosyncratically, according to theme. The complete poems remained unavailable until Rebecca Crump’s definitive three-volume variorum edition (The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, Louisiana State University Press, 1979-90). Crump arranged the poems according to the volumes in which they originally appeared, and included special sections for poems separately published, privately printed or unpublished during the poet’s lifetime. This edition remains the gold standard for Rossetti scholars. Betty S. Flowers followed Crump’s model for the 2001 single-volume paperback Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems (Penguin, 2001). Her annotations include William Michael’s notes from The Poetical Works and passages from Rossetti’s devotional prose-works.
Christina Rossetti’s letters have been collected and annotated by Antony H. Harrison in four volumes in The Letters of Christina Rossetti (University of Virginia Press, 1997-2004). Harrison’s is the standard edition. See also Lona Mosk Packer’s The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters (University of California Press, 1963) for their focus on Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti’s relationship with their publisher.
Originally published by the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), and out of print since the early twentieth century, four of Rossetti’s devotional prose-works were issued in facsimile reprint editions in 2003 by Thoemmes Press, introduced by Maria Keaton: Called to be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied, Letter and Spirit: Notes on the Commandments Time Flies: A Reading Diary and The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse. Rossetti’s other devotional prose-works, Annus Domini: A Prayer for Each Day of the Year, Founded on a Text of Holy Scripture (1874) and Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Stories of the Benedicite (1879), are not included in the Thoemmes editions, and remain out of print. Selections from the devotional prose can also be found in David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood’s Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti (Palgrave, 1998).
A good single source of Rossetti’s short stories is Jan Marsh’s edition of Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose (Dent, 1994), which contains ‘Maude’, ‘Nick’, ‘Hero’, ‘The Lost Titian’, ‘Vanna’s Twins’, ‘Commonplace’ (all 1870) and ‘Speaking Likenesses’ (1874). Another wide selection can be found in Kent and Stanwood’s Selected Prose, which contains ‘Commonplace’, ‘The Lost Titian’, ‘Nick’, ‘Prose and Cons’, ‘Maude’ and ‘Speaking Likenesses’. ‘Commonplace’ has been reprinted separately (Hesperus Press, 2005), with an introduction by Andrew Motion.
Also of interest are Rossetti’s articles on Dante - ‘Dante, An English Classic’ for the Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and Family Treasury (1867) and ‘Dante. The Poet Illustrated Out of the Poem’ for The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine (1884) - which can be found in Kent and Stanwood’s Selected Prose.
The mid-1980s revival of interest in Rossetti resulted in landmark publications such as: Dolores Rosenblum, Christina Rossetti: The Poetry of Endurance (Southern Illinois University Press, 1986); the essay collection The Achievement of Christina Rossetti, ed. David A. Kent (Cornell University Press, 1987); and Antony H. Harrison, Christina Rossetti in Context (University of North Carolina Press, 1988). The 1990s continued to place Rossetti ‘in context’, with Diane D’Amico’s study of the poet’s artistic relationship to Anglo-Catholicism in Christina Rossetti: Faith, Gender, and Time (Louisiana State University Press, 1999), while Mary Arseneau, Antony Harrison and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra edited the significant collection The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Ohio University Press, 1999).
More recent publications include Alison Chapman’s The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti (Palgrave, 2000), Lorraine Janzen Kooistra’s Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (Ohio University Press, 2002), Lynda Palazzo’s Christina Rossetti’s Feminist Theology (Palgrave, 2002), Mary Arseneau’s Recovering Christina Rossetti (Palgrave, 2004), Constance Hassett’s Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (University of Virginia Press, 2005) and Dinah Roe’s Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (Palgrave, 2007).
There are many biographies of Christina Rossetti, but curiously the most significant are both the most distant and the most recent. Ellen A. Proctor’s A Brief Memoir of Christina G. Rossetti. With a preface by W. M. Rossetti (SPCK, 1895), written by Rossetti’s late-life friend shortly after the poet’s death, is notable for its personal, intimate tone and its small-scale rendering of a poet usually considered larger-than-life. Although authorized, and so to some extent censored by William Michael, Mackenzie Bell’s Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (Hurst and Blackett, 1898) contains a wealth of biographical information and acute poetic analysis. Lona Mosk Packer’s Christina Rossetti (University of California Press, 1963), though most famous for its speculation about an affair between Rossetti and the painter William Bell Scott, is an easy read, and a good place for readers new to Rossetti to begin. Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life by Georgina Battiscombe (Constable, 1981) holds a similar appeal. Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (Jonathan Cape, 1994), Jan Marsh’s balanced, thoughtful and comprehensive study of the poet’s literary and personal life, is easily the best of the twentieth-century selection, and is strongly recommended.