Christina Georgina Rossetti
1830–1894
Biography
Christina Georgina Rossetti was an English poet whose verse ranged from romantic and devotional poems to nursery rhymes and Christmas carols. She was born in London, the youngest of four children of Gabriele Rossetti, a poet who had gone into political exile from Italy, and of Frances Polidori. Her elder brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a painter and poet at the centre of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, and Christina appears in several of his paintings. She lived most of her life in London and never married. Ill health and low spirits troubled her for much of her life, and her steady religious faith ran through her writing.
Her first commercially printed book of poems, Goblin Market and Other Poems, came out from Macmillan in 1862. Its long title poem follows two sisters who are tempted by goblin men selling fruit, and it sets the danger of forbidden food inside a story about loyalty between sisters. Her brother drew the woodcut illustrations for the book, and writers as different as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Algernon Swinburne and Alfred Tennyson praised it. She also wrote the words of “In the Bleak Midwinter”, a carol that Gustav Holst later set to music.
The site holds Goblin Market and The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems, the collection Macmillan published in 1866. Together they show the range of her work: fairy-tale imagery, quiet religious seriousness and a clear, musical craft. Later writers, among them Virginia Woolf and Philip Larkin, were influenced by her poetry, and that is why her name still matters to readers of English verse.
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Books
Goblin Market, The Prince’s Progress, and Other Poems
by Christina Georgina Rossetti
Christina Rossetti's two volumes of 1862 and 1866 give the title poem, in which the sisters Laura and Lizzie meet the goblin merchants whose fruit is a poison, and The Prince's Progress. A long shelf of lyrics on love, loss and faith follows, among them Up-Hill and A Birthday.…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.