The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (review)

Abstract

In 1988 Antony H. Harrison wrote: "Since the early 1930s, only one major critical book has been devoted to the work of Christina Rossetti. This astonishing fact has its roots deep in the history of modern critical tradition, which was until the 1970s dominated largely by the 'new critics' in the academy" (Christina Rossetti in Context ix). Harrison added that the expanding "range of critical methodologies" (ix) available to students of literary history meant that it was now possible to reevaluate figures such as Rossetti whose extensive writings had for the most part seemed unworthy of scholarly attention in previous decades. Even in 1972, at the time when feminist reassessments of the canon were burgeoning, Lionel Stevenson showed no hesitation in asserting that the poet's writing failed to evince "intellectual substance" (The Pre-Raphaelite Poets [1972]: 88). Harrison would produce what counts among the finest scholarly inquiries into the demanding oeuvre of a writer whose absorption in expressive forms—ballad, hymn, and lyric—can lead unsuspecting readers to believe that no depth lies beneath their seemingly unsophisticated surfaces. As Harrison acknowledges, the appearance in 1979 of R. W. Crump's variorum edition of Rossetti's complete poems assisted enormously in advancing our understanding of a somewhat idiosyncratic figure whose religious faith and sexual predilections have become central in classroom discussions of Victorian poetry. A very distinguished group of scholars—including Cora Kaplan and Jerome J. McGann—has provided teachers with historically informed ways of comprehending how Rossetti's poetry and prose engaged nineteenth-century debates about female sexuality, the Anglican liturgy, and Dante. The Culture of Christina Rossetti—a substantial collection of twelve significant essays that Harrison helped to edit—reveals that research on this poet's remarkable body of work has reached full maturity.