Christina Rossetti:Context

 Christina Rossetti was born on the 5th  December 1830 in London. Her father was Gabriele Rossetti who was a poet and her mother was Frances Rossetti. Christina had 2 brothers and a sister, one of her brothers (Dante) was an influential poet and artist and he founded the pre-Raphaelite group in 1848. Education was not compulsory until 1870 therefore her mother and father educated her at home so she had a very creative and imaginative childhood reading lots of fairy tales and poems, its likely this influenced her heavily to begin writing her poetry. In the 1840’s her father became very unwell and had to quit his job, family life became quite difficult and Christina suffered a nervous breakdown at 14 years old. During this period she, her mother and sister all became very interested in the Anglo-Catholic movement and religion became a huge part of her life which is clear when reading her poetry. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson but the engagement was broken off when James turned to Catholicism  in 1850. Another 2 men proposed but Rossetti declined them both.

She died on 29 December 1894 age 64.

Publication:

Rossetti’s first poems were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, which had been founded by her brother William Michael and his friends.

Women were idealised as mothers, while those who failed to meet expectations were censured as prostitutes with uncontrollable sexual desires. Women were excluded from some occupations and activities, but they entered new ones, for example authorship, teaching, and charity work. Working-class women still had to work to support themselves and their families, though the range of occupations available to them may have narrowed and some work, such as “sweated labour” in the textile trades, took place in the home. The concept of the respectable male “breadwinner”, who had the responsibility for providing financially for his entire family, was increasingly influential in this period. Consequently, women were frequently expected to give up their jobs when they got married.

Christina Rossetti had complicated views on female suffrage and equality. At times she used the Biblical idea of woman being inferior  to man as reason for maintaining the issues present at that time, while at others she argued for female representation in Parliament and spoke out against the sexual exploitation of women in prostitution. In many ways this shows her to be a particularly complex thinker about the position of women in society and it is certainly a concern which she comes back to time and again in her poetry. Her views may not always be ‘radical’ as such, but they are usually far from conservative and often questioning, challenging and potentially subversive.