Christina Rossetti Biography Quotes 12 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family Background
Christina Georgina Rossetti was born on December 5, 1830, in London to a family steeped in letters, art, and Italian exile politics. Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian poet and Dante scholar who had fled Naples for political reasons, taught Italian at King's College London. Her mother, Frances Polidori Rossetti, was the daughter of the Italian intellectual Gaetano Polidori and the sister of John William Polidori, the physician and author of The Vampyre. Christina was the youngest of four siblings: Maria Francesca, Dante Gabriel, and William Michael. The Rossetti home was bilingual, bookish, and devout, and Frances largely educated her children at home, fostering both their literary gifts and their religious seriousness.

Education, Faith, and Early Writing
A High Church Anglican piety shaped Christina from childhood. In her teens she experienced bouts of ill health and emotional strain as the family's fortunes declined and her father's health failed. An attempt by mother and daughters to run a small day school fell short, but the household remained a crucible for creativity. Guided by her mother's instruction and the example of her learned grandfather, Christina began writing early. In 1847 her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, privately printed her Verses, marking her first book-length appearance. When Dante Gabriel co-founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848, the family's artistic life expanded further. Christina contributed poems to the group's short-lived magazine The Germ in 1850 under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, and she sat for her brother's paintings The Girlhood of Mary Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini!, participating, if cautiously, in the circle's experiments.

Pre-Raphaelite Connections and Personal Relationships
Christina's relations with the Pre-Raphaelite milieu were intimate yet independent. Dante Gabriel became a leading painter-poet of the movement; William Michael served as its chronicler and later as Christina's editor; Maria Francesca pursued religious life and scholarship, publishing The Shadow of Dante and entering a sisterhood. Within this world Christina formed attachments that tested her convictions. She was briefly engaged to James Collinson, a painter associated with the Brotherhood; the engagement ended, by most accounts, over religious differences. Years later she declined a proposal from the linguist Charles Cayley, again out of concern for doctrinal compatibility. Her sister-in-law Elizabeth Siddal, a poet and artist married to Dante Gabriel, moved in the same circles; Christina's sympathetic awareness of women's vulnerability and strength often reflects the experiences of women around her as well as her own.

Breakthrough and Major Works
Christina's major poetic debut came with Goblin Market and Other Poems in 1862, published by Macmillan with designs by Dante Gabriel. The volume was widely admired for its musicality and imaginative force. Its title poem, telling of sisters Laura and Lizzie and the perilous allure of goblin fruit, has been read as a parable of temptation and redemption, an allegory of the marketplace, and a meditation on female solidarity. The collection also contained lyrics that would become touchstones of Victorian verse, including Remember, Echo, and A Birthday. The Prince's Progress and Other Poems appeared in 1866, and A Pageant and Other Poems in 1881, adding sonnet sequences such as Monna Innominata and further lyrics of renunciation, desire, and eschatological longing. She also excelled at writing for children: Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), delicately illustrated by a Pre-Raphaelite associate, showcased her ear for cadence and her attentiveness to childhood's moral and imaginative worlds.

Charity, Illness, and Devotional Prose
From 1859 to 1870, Christina volunteered at the St Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women in Highgate, work that deepened her compassion and sharpened her understanding of social and spiritual suffering. In the 1870s she developed Graves' disease, which altered her appearance and limited her public life but did not silence her pen. The combination of illness, disciplined faith, and long practice turned her increasingly toward devotional writing. Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) combined reflections tied to the calendar with scriptural meditation, and The Face of the Deep (1892) offered a sustained commentary on the Book of Revelation. Her lyric A Christmas Carol, beginning In the bleak midwinter, was published in 1872 and later set to music by composers such as Gustav Holst and Harold Darke, becoming one of the English-speaking world's best-loved carols.

Style, Themes, and Critical Reputation
Rossetti's art is noted for crystalline diction, subtle musicality, and a temperament at once austere and tender. She could compress complex spiritual struggles into spare stanzas, or pour passionate feeling into richly imaged song. Themes of temptation and renunciation, the tension between earthly love and divine calling, and a steady awareness of mortality run through her work. Yet she balanced self-denial with compassion and imaginative generosity, giving voice to female experience without sensationalism. In sonnets like those of Monna Innominata she probed the dynamics of speech and silence in love; in Uphill she faced pilgrimage and promise with plainspoken assurance; in Goblin Market she fused fairy tale, commercial critique, and sacramental imagery to striking effect. Contemporary readers and later critics have recognized her as a major Victorian lyric poet, distinct from but equal in stature to the famous men of her era. William Michael Rossetti helped secure her place by editing and promoting her work, while a growing body of scholarship has emphasized the complexity and strength of her religious and feminist insights.

Final Years and Death
Christina's final years were marked by both productivity and suffering. She continued to write despite recurrent illness, and in the early 1890s she was diagnosed with cancer. She died in London on December 29, 1894. She was buried in Highgate Cemetery, where members of her family are interred. By then Dante Gabriel had predeceased her, and Maria had also died; William Michael lived on to steward the family's literary legacy. Christina left behind a body of poetry and prose that had already become part of the English canon in her lifetime and that has only grown in stature since.

Legacy
Christina Rossetti stands as one of the foremost English poets of the nineteenth century. Her lyrics remain central in anthologies; Remember and A Birthday are quoted wherever love and loss are marked, while In the bleak midwinter is sung each winter season across the English-speaking world. Her devotional works continue to be read for their candor and inwardness. The imaginative power of Goblin Market invites continued reinterpretation, from theological allegory to proto-feminist fable. Rooted in a household of artists and guided by rigorous faith, sustained by the editorial labors of her brother William Michael and the artistic companionship of Dante Gabriel and their circle, she forged a voice unmistakably her own: lucid, compassionate, exacting, and enduring.

Our collection contains 12 quotes who is written by Christina, under the main topics: Truth - Love - Hope - Faith - Poetry.

Other people realated to Christina: Christina G. Rossetti (Poet), Dante G. Rossetti (Poet), William Allingham (Poet), Laurence Housman (Playwright), Jean Ingelow (Poet), Gerald Finzi (Composer)

• 1881 A Pageant and Other Poems (Poetry Collection)
• 1872 Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book (Poetry Collection)
• 1870 Commonplace and Other Short Stories (Short Story Collection)
• 1866 The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (Poetry Collection)
• 1862 Goblin Market (Poem)

• Wikipedia