Christina Georgina Rossetti, like many talented women of the Victorian period, knew great frustration. While she had the exceptional good fortune to live amid the most stimulating artistic and literary influences of that era, she had little formal education. University training remained unavailable to all of her sex. Though her childhood years were without material want, her father’s death clouded her adolescence and a broken engagement her young womanhood. If Jan Marsh’s deductions are correct, paternal sexual abuse scarred the poet’s childhood. (This is in direct conflict with the settled picture that William Michael Rossetti, the poet’s younger brother, evokes in Rossetti Papers [1902].)
Such conjecture aside, it is clear that Rossetti had reached middle age before achieving any substantial recognition. Even then she had to contend with the dominating presence of Alfred, Lord Tennyson (whose epic scope she could not match), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (whose marriage had captured the popular imagination and whose romantic verse resembled her own), and the greater contemporary appeal of more cheerful women poets such as Jean Ingelow.
It may seem that Rossetti was fortunate to have her elder brother, Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti, as mentor and critic. It is true that he provided the first venue for her poetry in The Germ, the magazine of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Just as important, he introduced her to the artists who helped found this movement, W. Holman Hunt and John Millais. In so doing, he charted the literary course that her most popular verse would take, one that paralleled the aims of the Pre-Raphaelite painters: to recapture the realism that they believed had characterized the fine and literary arts before the birth of the Renaissance artist Raffaello Santi (1483-1520). Her brother also placed his sister’s work with Alexander Macmillan, titan of Victorian publishing and founder of the firm that still bears his name. The Macmillan edition of Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862), her first anthology, containing handsome woodcut drawings by her brother, provided her first national exposure and was a considerable success.
In practice, however, as Marsh demonstrates, Rossetti’s elder brother often attempted to dominate his sister artistically, usually in the guise of concern for her interests. Rossetti frequently had to use considerable skill to make her own preferences hold. That she managed to achieve this without ever offending her brother is an artistic triumph in itself.
Rossetti generously acknowledged her elder brother’s guidance in the dedication of her second collection, The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems (1866), but an intervening century has repeatedly shown that there was a vast difference between what Victorian women felt and what they literally expressed. Given time and place, Rossetti’s success was remarkable; she knew that it was, and she felt genuinely grateful to the men who had helped her. At precisely this time, after all, on the other side of the world, a much less traditional woman poet named Emily Dickinson was entrusting her poems to miscellaneous scraps of paper; her mentor, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had convinced her that the world was not ready for her poetry because it was eccentric and unfeminine, and at her death in 1886, only seven of her nearly eighteen hundred poems had seen any form of publication.
Dickinson’s literary unfulfillment was far more profound than Rossetti’s, though given what by contemporary standards seems the superhuman ability of Victorian women to accept things as they were, it is hardly likely that either Dickinson or Rossetti saw herself as a tragic figure. Sadness and discontent are there, but they are inseparable from the verse. One might well argue that had either woman lived in a society less conscious of place and class, she would have been an entirely different poet.
This, then, is the primary challenge that faces any contemporary biographer of a Victorian woman disinclined to question openly the norms of her time. To what degree did Rossetti view the constraints that surrounded her as imposing the status of victim, and to what extent did she manage to press beyond them in her life and in her work? Marsh frequently isolates such questions and casts new light upon them.
One example of this is the details Marsh provides concerning Rossetti’s work at Highgate Penitentiary, a church-sponsored hospice for prostitutes and unwed mothers in London. Such volunteer social work, which required periodic residence at the site, was virtually unheard of among ladies of the Victorian middle class. Had Highgate not had unimpeachable Anglican affiliations, Rossetti certainly could not have pursued her work there with impunity, for it brought her into direct contact with women whose very existence polite convention did not acknowledge. For Rossetti, it was a way to move beyond needlework and drawing room, perhaps even a means of vicarious identification with her contemporary Florence Nightingale, the much-lauded and sometimes vilified founder of modern nursing.
Marsh tirelessly explores other little-known aspects of her subject’s life and often uses them to illuminate some of the poet’s more enigmatic verse. She focuses particularly on the psychological and physical breakdown that Rossetti experienced in 1844, conventionally ascribed to an overly sensitive religious outlook. It is undeniably true that Rossetti’s high church training made her acutely conscious of sin’s presence in the world. Perhaps it also contributed to the periods of depression she suffered throughout her life. It is also likely that the long illness of her father, a series of strokes that affected both his mobility and his mind, added to her sense of guilt. Responsibility for his nursing came to settle almost entirely upon her while she was still in her teenage years. Marsh’s repeated conjectures of adolescent sexual abuse supposedly originating from her father appear as a means of explaining the girl’s condition. Later in the study, Marsh repeats these arguments at considerable length to support Rossetti’s preference for temptation imagery in much of her best-known work. Such speculations contribute a sensational element to an otherwise staid biography, but they cannot be proved. In fact, all documentary evidence portrays Rossetti’s father as the model of a Victorian parent, one with the advantage of Italian warmth.
Gabriele Rossetti was a talented though frustrated man; one can hardly doubt this. In Italy, the country of his birth, he had involved himself to a considerable degree in anti-Austrian revolutionary activity as a member of a group called the Carbonari. He had had hopes of an academic career in Italy, but his political stance thwarted them, and like many Italian patriots of the early nineteenth century, he fled to England. The Italian émigré community in London considered him an intellectual, and because of this he was named the first professor of Italian in the then-fledgling Kings College, London. He had only vague qualifications for such a post, but since tutoring in the Italian language was his only actual responsibility, he managed relatively soon to acquire a small following of students, chiefly from the growing London middle class.
His son Gabriel, the best-known member of the Rossetti family, would extend such family acquaintanceships into the aristocracy, especially after his reputation as artist had become secure. Gabriel had none of his sister’s religious scruples; like his younger brother William Michael he remained a lifelong agnostic, yet Gabriel too suffered from depression and, after the death of his wife, periodic severe mental illness. Marsh makes no attempt to ascribe this mental disorder to parental abuse, nor indeed could she have done so. What does emerge, and accurately, is the portrait of an extremely talented though self-centered man, one afflicted with frustration and self-caused doubt despite his outward confidence. He clearly had to bear the burden of contributing least of all the Rossetti children to the needs of the family (even when his income would have allowed him to do so) while drawing most heavily of all upon its resources. He alone of the Rossetti children had the advantages of university and academy training, and it was this that placed him among the brightest artists of his day.
Rossetti’s elder sister Maria Francesca and younger brother William contributed most tangibly to the family after their father’s death. Maria held a number of thankless jobs as governess, and William worked throughout his life as clerk and later as assistant supervisor for Inland Revenue, the British national taxation service. Maria would also write a text on the teaching of Italian, and William biographical sketches as well as art and literary criticism. Both would postpone their personal ambitions until well into middle age, when Maria would enter the Anglican sisterhood and William would marry. Christina Rossetti relied on Maria and William for practical support and advice; that which she received from Gabriel applied only to her verse or publishing negotiations, and she rarely solicited it. Indeed, one could argue that Rossetti spent much of her life trying to escape the description of Pre-Raphaelite disciple.
Rossetti’s mother, Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori Rossetti, was born in London, though she was the child of émigré parents. She spent years before her marriage in governess positions very much like those of her daughter Maria, and she founded two day schools, though without monetary success, after her husband’s sickness and subsequent death. The Polidoris, like many British immigrant families of the period, were anxious to assimilate, and one of its branches Anglicized its surname to Polydore in an attempt to hasten acceptance. Though Frances could not always be present in the home during Christina’s adolescent years, her strong Anglican attachments were taken up by both Rossetti daughters. All considered, the Rossettis were a remarkable family.
Marsh’s study does much to illustrate the varied phases of its subject’s career. All too often, Rossetti’s most reproduced poems make her seem a second Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The cold of death appears juxtaposed with images of spring, and the whole forms a touching lament mixed with ennui:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be 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 through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
Rossetti herself strove to dissociate such poems from any personal interpretation, though, as Marsh shows, she experienced disappointments in love at least twice. James Collinson, to whom she was engaged in her late teenage years, fell under the spell of the Romanizing Oxford Movement, converted to Roman Catholicism, then broke the engagement to study for the Catholic priesthood. Ironically, he left these studies before ordination and ultimately married as an Anglican.
More disappointing was Rossetti’s relationship with Arthur Cayley, a classics professor she met in her middle years. The difficulty here was Cayley’s reluctance to commit himself to anything more than exchanges of letters and love poems, hers often beautiful and profound, his sincere in their way though pedestrian. Rossetti continued to see Cayley throughout the remainder of her life, and she steadfastly supported his work in translating Homeric verse.
Rossetti’s fame rests essentially on two collections of verse: Goblin Market and Other Poems and The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. Each of these contains a long narrative poem, that in the first resembling a fairy tale in the style of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, the one in the second collection combining Arthurian and Bun-yanesque elements. Marsh’s study moves gracefully among these and other works, and she provides insightful commentary on Rossetti’s children’s and devotional verse as well as on her much-disparaged short stories to show that even these have their merits. What emerges is an engaging profile of a poet who knew her own strengths, came increasingly to recognize her artistic limits, and accepted willingly, even if with inner frustration, the constraints that Victorian England placed upon her.