A career of one's own:christina rossetti, literary success and love

Abstract

In this article it is proposed that the themes of loss and longing, which dominate the poetry of Christina Rossetti, relate less to love than to her ambitions and anxieties as a writer. By both drawing on and reassessing biographical studies of Rossetti, and by reading her poems in conjunction with details about the painful progress of her literary career, it is argued that Rossetti mimicked the conventional image of the Victorian lady poetess and employed the love lyric as a coded expression of her more subversive and unspeakable desire for literary success. The article focuses on the frustrations she encountered as a writer – including her relationship with her brother, Gabriel, and the repeated suppression or misprinting of her name – and suggests that the motifs of memory and death which pervade her poems bear witness to her ardent desire to be remembered and become immortalised in literary history. A poet traditionally associated with renunciation and passive endurance, even within feminist literary criticism, it is suggested in this article that Christina Rossetti deserves to be recognised not only as a confident and committed writer but one whose fierce ambition and desperate desire for fame and fortune find expression in her poetry.