Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans

Abstract

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art ed. by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans Elizabeth Helsinger (bio) Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, edited by Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans; pp. 192, 200 color and black and white illustrations. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018, £30.00, $40.00. One might easily take Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans's beautiful, copiously illustrated volume Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art for the catalog of an exhibition. Among other obstacles to such an ideal assemblage, however, is the fact that three of the four volumes for which Rossetti is known to have produced drawings or watercolors have disappeared. This collection offers instead an illustrated survey of the ways in which we might consider Rossetti's person and poetry "in art," with essays discussing the pictures with which she lived (Nicholas Tromans); the visual records of her appearance (Susan Owens); the hermeneutics of the images on which she drew for her own and others' books (Dinah [End Page 344] Roe); the lives of her books as designed objects with covers, title pages, and illustrations (Stephen Calloway); and artists' responses to her poetry in autonomous works as well as illustrations (Owens, Tromans, and Hilary Underwood). This closing chapter expands the list of artists inspired by Rossetti considerably beyond well-known figures like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Arthur Hughes, or Fernand Khnopff (whose two wonderful symbolist pictures, Who Shall Deliver Me? (Christina Georgina Rossetti) (1890) and I Lock My Door Upon Myself (Christina Georgina Rossetti) (1891), are both shown in color here). Tromans (in his essay on the paucity and aesthetic poverty of the pictures Rossetti chose to keep) and Roe (in her chapter on Rossetti's interpretive drawing practice) rightly remind us that Rossetti did not greatly value art for its own sake. She was interested less in literal representations of the things of this world than in those things as signs and symbols pointing elsewhere, meditative aids for a life lived in hopes of redemption after death. Rossetti's poetry indeed testifies to a strongly visualizing imagination, something she shared with her brother Dante Gabriel. Her close contacts with the Pre-Raphaelite art of her brother and his friends, her short-lived efforts to learn to draw (perhaps to teach in the school she briefly helped her mother to run), and her continued private practice of drawing as an integral part of reading: all indicate the continued presence of the visual arts in her life. It nonetheless strikes one as an exaggeration—or at least a misplaced emphasis—to announce, as the editors do in their introduction, that Rossetti lived "a creative life in which literature was the warp and visual art the weft" (12). Rossetti is first of all a poet. For the most part, the essays collected here do not break new ground. Literary scholars in particular will be aware of the considerable recent literature exploring Rossetti's engagements with visual art (claims for the role of the visual in her life no longer seem in need of any exaggeration). Most literary scholars will also be aware of extensive recent scholarship on the Tractarian doctrine of reserve, as it may have influenced Rossetti's hermeneutical habits in both the making and the interpretation of images. The contributors to this volume are, however, with one exception, art historians and curators excited at the opportunity to consider Rossetti within the context of the visual arts. The editors occasionally are led to venture debatable claims for her poetry: for example, that "of the poetry that emerged from [the early PRB] circle, hers is now recognized as the most powerful" (9). (Many, including Christina, would argue that her brother Dante Gabriel's literary contributions to The Germ [1850] were equally powerful.) But to read these essays with their high quality, large-sized illustrations to hand is to understand better not only how much but in what ways we might profitably consider Rossetti's life and poetry in the context of the visual arts. Two essays succeed particularly well, for different reasons. Owens opens with an apparently straightforward question: "What did Christina Rossetti look like?" (43). Her chapter considers images of the poet's faces: in photographs...