Christina Rossetti

Life;

Christina Rossetti was born in London on December 5th 1830. She was the youngest of four children, and her parents were Italian. Both Rossetti’s father (Gabriele Rossetti) and her brother (Dante Gabriel Rossetti) were also poets, and they founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Rossetti first started writing when she was 12 years old in 1842, and these poems were printed by her grandfather into a private book. When Rossetti was 19, she started contributing some of her poems to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal, The Germs.

Education;

Rossetti was home schooled by her mother, and she was made to study religious education, classics, fairy tales and novels. The influences of the work by Dante Alighieri, Petrarch and other Italian writers filled the home and had a great impact on her writing later on.

Roles of women;

The roles of women in the 19th century were that they had to stay at home and be the ‘excessive carer’. This is because the men were seen as the ‘bread winners’ and so the women would have to stay at home and do the housework whilst looking after the children and meeting the family’s emotional needs.

Publicatoin;

In 1870, Rossetti wrote a letter to her brother, Dante. In this letter she compared herself to Elizabeth Browning, a great female predecessor. Part of what she wrote said ‘It is not in me, and therefore, it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or philanthropy with Mrs. Browning: such many-sidedness I leave to a greater than I’. This shows that she thought of her own work as not good enough to be listened to when there are people much better. She also created a pseudonym (fake name) called Ellen Alleyn. She did this to get away from the criticism she thought she would receive because of her writing. Her writing about her views on the roles of women was controversial and so she felt like she needed to hide away from them and so she created the fake name.

Religious views;

Rossetti was an Anglican Christian. Her religious beliefs had a major impact and influence on her writing. Christina, along with her sister Maria and their mother Frances, maintained a strong commitment to High Anglicanism whilst her brother Dante instead became more free-thinking and withdrew from his beliefs. She also worked for the Anglican sisterhood at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary, Highgate, to help prostitutes escape their lives on the streets by retraining them for domestic service.

Rossetti's views on the roles of women;

Christina Rossetti had complicated views on female suffrage and equality. She sometimes used the ideas of the Bible that women were less important than men because they had to stay home, and because men were seen as the stronger sex they would go to work. Men were expected to control their wives and their property. At other times she would argue for female representation in Parliament and spoke out against the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution.

Annabelle Hunt