Christina Rossetti’s ‘Religious Mania’

Abstract

In 1968, James A. Kohl published a note made on a blank page of a copy of Mackenzie Bell’s Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study (London, 1898): A question arose, so H. C. Metcalfe told me, while this biography was being written by Bell, as to whether a notice shd. be inserted of the fact that the doctor who attended on Christina Rossetti when she was about 16–18 said she was then more or less out of her mind ⌜suffering, in fact, from a form of insanity, I believe, a kind of religious mania⌝; & for obvious reasons it was determined this fact shd. be omitted, tho’ the doctor’s good faith was not impugned; I understood from Metcalfe he survived at the time Bell was writing the book, & gave his statement at first hand. To the student of psychology as related to physiology, the fact is too important to go unrecorded. I am not sure of the extent of time during which this phase is alleged to have lasted.1