Rossetti's Works Research Articles

D. G. Rossetti and William Morris

D. G. Rossetti and William Morris Florence Boos (bio) D. G. Rossetti Last year's publications on Dante Rossetti and William Morris were fewer than usual, but nonetheless in aggregate, these offer new insights and approaches. For Rossetti, Fergus McGhee's "Rossetti's Giorgione and the Victorian 'Cult of Vagueness' " (Cambridge Quarterly 50, no. 3 [2021]: 279–295) identifies an important aspect of Rossetti's aesthetic as expressed in his essay "Hand and Soul": a commitment to what he called "definite vagueness," a precise impression of unknowability. After noting the importance of this concept to several of Rossetti's contemporaries, including Edgar Allan Poe, McGhee illuminates ways in which Rossetti's sonnet "A Venetian Pastoral, by Giorgione; in the Louvre" is specifically designed to evoke a mood of haziness, mutability, and indefinability that he associated with the Renaissance Venetian concept of vaghezza. McGhee notes that Rossetti's paintings for pictures are, in fact, characterized by a lack of correspondence between the painting and its accompanying poem, so much so that for his early poems-cum-pictures, he originally wrote out prose descriptions. McGhee demonstrates that Rossetti's revisions were carefully designed to increase this sense of elusiveness, and he differs with earlier critics who place the poem within an ekphrastic tradition. Instead, Rossetti's sonnet, through its several changes in tone and speaker, creates a sense of shifting intimacy and distance, relying "for the complexity of its effect upon a continuous tussle between inner and outer perspectives," avoiding the grandiose or unearthly transcendent effect sought by many others in favor of something "fragile, tangible, near at hand" (p. 289). In "Rossetti Reconsidered: Dante's Vita Nuova and Its Paths to Canonization in Victorian Literary Culture" (Le tre corone 8 [2021]: 1–164), Frederica Coluzzi places Rossetti's well-known 1861 translation of his The Early Italian Poets within the context of the other creative and critical Dantean translations and reappropriations that flourished between the 1840s and 1880s. She notes the distinctive features of Rossetti's edition, whose more than two hundred poems had been carefully collated from British Museum materials including chronicles, anthologies, and imperfect poetic texts representing varied styles, periods, and dialects. Rossetti had scrupulously sought the opinions of [End Page 395] his literary friends and contacts, including Tennyson, Ruskin, William Allingham, Charles Eliot Norton, and Elizabeth Gaskell, and his careful arrangements sought to replicate the melodies of the originals, as well as providing the first overview of the development of early Italian poetry and its influence on Dante. He had not been alone, however, for in 1860, the American Charles Eliot Norton had issued a New Life of Dante Alighieri that included his own translation of the Vita Nuova with extensive commentaries, and shortly after the publication of Rossetti's volume, Theodore Martin issued another version of The Vita Nuova of Dante (1862) in a less expensive annotated edition. Reviewers appreciated the fact that Rossetti's anthology provided an original history of the formation of an Italian national literature, but sales were modest. Rossetti then issued a new edition in 1874 under the title Dante and His Circle, rearranging its contents to emphasize its importance for the study of this increasingly popular poet. The material in Coluzzi's valuable account of the distinctive features of Rossetti's work and his relationship to predecessors and competitors might well have been included in her Dante Beyond Influence, reviewed shortly, since to fully understand the topic, one would need to read both works. A further topic might also merit attention: the extent to which Rossetti recast the original texts of his non-Dantean translations. He had prepared translations of Blake's poems for The Life of William Blake (2 vols., 1863) as a favor to Anne Gilchrist, who was then editing her late husband Alexander's work for publication, and although Rossetti's versions are arguably distinctive creative works in their own right, they differ significantly from the versions prepared by more recent Blake editors. Frederica Coluzzi's Dante Beyond Influence: Rethinking Reception in Victorian Literary Culture (Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 2021) approaches the issue of translation and reception more broadly. She concentrates on the years 1865–1921 as manifesting a...

İdeal Arayışı ve Sanat-Nesnesinin Gerçekliği; D. G. Rossetti’nin Eserlerinde Metinlerarasılık, Antilogike, ve Öz Farkındalık.

D.G. Rossetti's works reveal how the poet, as an aestheticist through his pursuit of the ideal, frees the concept of reality from pre-given limitations. He mainly creates an open field of renegotiation, even introducing an alternative understanding of real and authentic. In his famous poems "The Blessed Damozel" and "The Burden of Nineveh," Rossetti applies intertextuality and signifies the potential of dialectic poetry. His focus on aesthetic qualities and the subversion of the subject matter assures interpretative ambiguity. This kind of ambiguity rather than confusion achieves poetic self-awareness and omens future perceptions of reality, which can be composed by an object, as an artistic process, or the artistic object itself. This article recognizes the links of ancient (Platonic) philosophy on Aesthetics and Reality with contemporary opinions in Philosophical Realism. However, it mainly focuses on two distinctive works of the Victorian poet as a contemplating station of how an artistic object, freed from any responsibility except its consistency on its aesthetic qualities, can signify dialectic (higher state of cognition) processes affording reality.

Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, by Emma Mason

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith by Emma Mason Joshua King (bio) Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith, by Emma Mason; pp. x + 212. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £30.00, $39.95. A new contribution to Oxford University Press's Spiritual Lives series, Emma Mason's Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith offers a groundbreaking and graceful account of Christina Rossetti's ecological spirituality. Rossetti's sophisticated theology, and, to a lesser extent, proto-environmentalism have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Yet Mason is the first to identify Rossetti's ecological view of grace as foundational to her faith, politics, and poetics. For Rossetti, Mason helps us recognize, grace is a divine energy that originates and sustains life in its interactive evolutionary development, drawing all things toward loving participation in each other and God in a renewal of creation at Christ's Second Advent. "Apocalypse" is in this view not a distant destruction of the world, but a liberating transformation of this one "triggered through the love of things for each other" (21). Rossetti's ecotheology emerges in her practice, through a poetics that celebrates the vitality of all creation and eschews waste, and through devotional prose rich in empirical detail. As a whole, Mason argues, Rossetti's work challenges ecocriticism's residual tendency to "reduce Christianity to a one-dimensional simplification of fundamentalist Evangelicalism" that justifies the conquest of nature and disregards real life by focusing on the world's end (22). Mason seeks to elucidate Rossetti's personal ecotheology as well as its intricate participation in her contexts and the "history of radical Christian ecology" (22). The four body chapters pursue these aims through stages of Rossetti's career. The first reveals the greenness of Rossetti's well-known Tractarian roots, demonstrating the ways in which her ecotheology grew out of Tractarianism's vision of the created world as a "network in which every being was connected with the divine" (35). Immensely important to Rossetti's sense of creation as a community was Edward Bouverie Pusey, leading Tractarian and visiting preacher at Rossetti's Christ Church in London. Pusey affirmed an "intercommunion" of creation with Christ that is especially revealed and encountered through the Eucharist (34). Chapter 2 freshly connects Rossetti's ecological Christology to her mid-century involvement with Pre-Raphaelitism, which reinforced her Tractarian-formed belief in the non-binary integration of the material with the divine. Assimilating Pre-Raphaelitism, Platonism, patristic and Franciscan Trinitarian theology, and William Blake's sense of creation as the divine body of the Savior, Rossetti comes to see creation as networks of humans, other animals, plants, and inanimate things that "are connected through a kinship with God" based on the intercommunion of the Trinity (93). Such kinship is celebrated and threatened in Rossetti's best-known poem, "Goblin Market" (composed 1859, published 1862). Its famous lists (for example, of fruits), Mason claims, act like genealogies in the Old Testament, testifying to an interwoven kinship of creation. Mason could have done more to account for the ways in which the poem also links its profusive lists and similes to sensual self-absorption and objectification of others; that said, Mason illuminates the poem's critique of commercialism for commodifying and selling creation, which God gave to all things for their home. Chapter 3 uncovers in Rossetti's mid-career poetry and prose a view of creation as a sacred commons of companion species evolving over time as part of the divine. This drove Rossetti's passionate opposition to vivisection as "dismember[ment]" of "the divine [End Page 514] body" (112). Mason ranges from Rossetti's children's poems in Sing-Song (1872), to prose studies such as Seek and Find (1879) and Called to Be Saints (1881), to poems less often studied, such as "'All thy works praise thee, O Lord': A Processional of Creation" (1881). Rossetti's own sense of creation as a sacred commons was informed, Mason reveals, by the "urbanature" of London, from Regent's Park to the Zoological Gardens and other green spaces (43). Mason highlights the range of ecotheological botanical works that "affirmed" for Rossetti an "evolutionary and green reading of creation compatible with Christianity...

The Substance of Shadows: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Mimesis

You knew that figure, when painted, had been seen; yet was not thing to be seen of men. --Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Hand and Soul (1850) (1) At the end of his 1883 essay on Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater notes hat poetry has historically exercised two distinct functions. may, he writes, reveal, may unveil to every eye, the ideal aspects of common things ... or may actually add to the number of motives poetic and uncommon themselves, by the imaginative creation of things that are ideal from their very birth. While Rossetti, according to Pater, made significant contributions to the poetry of common things, his most characteristic work lay in the adding to poetry of fresh poetic material, of new order of phenomena. (2) Earlier the essay, Pater had suggested that Rossetti's chief gift this regard is his sincerity (p. 206), the ability to find exact poetic equivalents for certain private inner states. Yet because the peculiar phase of soul the poem reproduces is known to the poet alone, can be grasped only by way of its poetic imitation (p. 207). Pater's figure for this paradox is suggestive: is, he says, akin to the way a well-trained hand can follow on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it (p. 206). This image displaces the opposition between the original and the copy that dominates traditional accounts of mimesis, for attributes the precision of detail conventionally associated with strictly mimetic poetry (the tracing-paper) to style that begins not with the real but with another work of art (the original drawing), work that cannot be known apart from the traced copy. Rossetti's poetry faithfully reproduces world unknowable by any other means, is referential, but paradoxically describes referent that can be grasped no other way. Rossetti never composed extended theoretical treatises, unlike so many other writers his intellectual milieu, but he did, as Jerome McGann notes, treat his poetry and painting as rigorous form of theoretical practice. His works draw on traditional forms and conventions but incessantly manipulate them to explore the nature of artistic production, dissemination, and response. (3) These works may not seem obviously radical to artistic sensibilities trained by modernist and post-modernist experimentation, but they are no less powerful their questioning of entrenched theoretical traditions. Taking McGann's observation and Pater's image of the tracing paper as my starting points, I want to look what follows at Rossetti's manipulation of the traditional theory of mimesis number of works that specifically evoke it. My two central examples will be the important early painting, Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849; Tate Britain), and the short poem Aspecta Medusa (1870). These works powerfully reframe the Platonic opposition between art and the real. Far more than stereotypically aestheticist reversal of mimesis--art over reality, the copy over the original, the artificial over the natural--Rossetti these works radically questions Plato's insistence on the fundamental unreality of art and literature. They are akin to Pater's tracing paper: manifest copies that have the paradoxical status of originals. According to Plato's canonical claim, works of art mime the appearance of something else and do not have specific nature of their own. They are reducible to the function of illustration or expression, of depicting reality or conveying images of behavior worthy (or more often unworthy) of emulation. The maker of the phantom, the imitator, Plato writes the Republic, understands nothing of what is, but rather of what looks like is. (4) Either mirror or messenger, the work is inevitably lacking, secondary and dependent. It tries vain to depict the real but is not real itself. Rossetti's works incessantly evoke the traditional theory of mimesis: mirrors, shadows, doubles, and reflections--all the machinery of Platonic theory--are pervasive both the poetry and the painting. …

The Uncertainty of Goblin Market

Some of most persuasive recent readings of Goblin Market have been those which renew that critical tradition in which this poem--in which Christina Rossetti's work as a whole--is to be understood ultimately in religious terms. Such readings have often incorporated insights from critics who have focused on gender or on sexuality; but, at their strongest, they have been sure enough of their ground to know where they are irreconcilable with readings which have a primarily secular focus. It seems that there does come a point at which not every explanation of what happens in Goblin Market can be defensible. (1) This essay subscribes to position that readings of Rossetti's work must make sure of their religious ground; yet it does so while maintaining that this religious ground is itself much less sure than is generally supposed. To maintain this is, of course, to risk overstatement--for criticism which insists on centrality of religious ideas to Rossetti's work does not form a monolithic corpus. Nevertheless, much of it shares a disinclination to consider possibility that these religious ideas could themselves be conflicting. It is as if a consistent theological system is tacitly posited and then invoked in order to produce effect of consistency in Rossetti's work. The contention of this essay is that this could not be more mistaken: that Rossetti's writing repeatedly pivots upon contradiction and obscurity, and that its intellectual rigor is nowhere more evident than in this determination to probe uncertainties of Christian theology. This is a large contention, one which will not be substantiated in a single essay. But a start may be made by inviting a rereading of Rossetti's most read poem--for is not Goblin Market itself, to go no further, structured upon theological contradiction? I It's worth telling story once more. A young woman called Laura gets fruit from goblin men, eats it, and longs to eat more of it, but will never find goblin men again. That's problem with goblin fruit: those who have tasted it want what they will never get, and dwindle and die dreaming of melons. Yet that's not only thing goblin fruit does. Laura's sister Lizzie goes to get more of it for her, but goblin men want Lizzie to eat fruit too and they try to force it into her mouth. Lizzie resists, and runs home dripping with juice and pulp; then Laura kisses her, and in kissing her tastes juices once more. The fruits which once had poisoned Laura now cure her. So Laura survives to become a storyteller, telling children tale of how she had tasted poisonous fruit and of how her sister had won for her the fiery antidote--which was more of that fruit. It was antidote to itself. What she does not tell children is why goblin fruit once had power to poison her and then had power to restore her. Not only does she not explain this, but there is no suggestion that she ought to explain it. It is as if Laura and these unquestioning children can only know what fruit did on two occasions, and know that they ought to be thankful that Lizzie got Laura more of poison that cures. When we read Goblin Market (written 1859, published 1862) we will surely be more demanding than children: we will want an explanation of double power of fruit. We know that fairy-tale mode of poem can contain perfectly inexplicable plot detail; and yet, whatever Rossetti's reported denials of a deep purpose to this poem, our wider reading of her work may lead us to expect that this detail is doing more than tell us that there are things in Fairyland that would be inconceivable in nineteenth-century England. It is therefore important to know that consumption of substances which could become either poisons or cures was by no means inconceivable in nineteenth-century England; important, too, to know that Christina Rossetti herself consumed such substances--was, indeed, dependent upon them. …

Mastering the Ineffable: Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "The Vase of Life" and the Kantian Sublime

Mastering the Ineffable:Dante Gabriel Rossetti's “The Vase of Life” and the Kantian Sublime Carolyn F. Austin (bio) Any reader of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's ekphrastic poems (that is, poems that take a work of art as their object) must be struck by the ineffability he attributes to paintings or the subjects they represent. Leonardo da Vinci's Our Lady of the Rocks deals with "things occult"; Andrea Mantenga's Allegorical Dance of Women is full of the "secret of the wells of Life," which the heart knows but the mind can know nothing of. These visual scenes are "mysteries," a word Rossetti uses to open three of his ekphrastic poems.1 They cannot be known intellectually, cannot be solved. Their meaning can only be vaguely intuited but cannot be expressed. Rossetti seems to be positing himself as a votive at Art's altar, a humble supplicant whose understanding cannot comprehend the goddess he serves, but whose heart holds some intuition of her meaning. But is such humbleness genuine, or is this insistence on the radical distance between art and the observer actually a way of asserting a more subtle mastery on the part of the observer, the poet, over the visual arts? I will argue that Rossetti's insistence on the mystery of the visual arts fits into a long transcendental and Romantic tendency to see in the ineffable not so much a failure of mastery as an eventual triumph of the observer who can conceptualize the ineffable, even as he (a pronoun I use intentionally here) cannot fully comprehend or sense it. The mystery which Rossetti attributes to the visual arts has its roots in concepts like Kant's mathematical sublime, in which the viewer of the infinite is sensorially overwhelmed by the expanse but triumphs in his very ability to conceptualize infinity. To claim that Rossetti continues to work within a tradition of radical difference between verbal and visual media is to run counter to many of Rossetti critics who see him—chiefly because of his use of both poetry and painting in composite works—as part of the ut pictura poesis tradition.2 Walter Pater's essay on Rossetti in Appreciations—a starting place for much further criticism—begins by asserting both the importance of Rossetti's simultaneous [End Page 159] careers as a painter and poet and the equal illumination that one aspect of Rossetti's work could throw on the other. In fact, Pater couches his praise for Rossetti's poetry within a painterly simile: Rossetti's "gift of transparency in language—the control of a style which did but obediently shift and shape itself to the mental motion" is like "a well-trained hand" which "follow[s] on the tracing-paper the outline of an original drawing below it."3 Pater himself indulges in a simile that at its foundation celebrates the similarities of the arts. Later critics will be more explicit in their assertion that Rossetti peacefully unites the arts. Maryan Ainsworth, for example, refers to Rossetti's composite works first as "a marriage, or liaison, between poem and picture" and then as a "symbiosis," moving from a meeting of equals to a complete intertwining of the arts.4 Other critics use the rhetoric of "the sister arts," making poetry and painting into siblings that are drawn even closer together by their shared gender. Susan Beegel claims that Rossetti makes "the sister arts of poetry and painting equal partners in the business of illustration,"5 and Eben Bass asserts that Rossetti's works and that of all the Pre-Raphaelites "ignore the classical barrier erected by Lessing between the sister arts."6 These critics are not without the justification of Rossetti's own assertion about the near-identity of painting and poetry. In a series of aphorisms that William Rossetti collected under "Sentences and Notes" in the 1911 Works, Rossetti writes that "picture and poem bear the same relation to each other as beauty does in man and woman: the point of meeting where the two are most identical is the supreme perfection" (p. 606). The arts should, according to this formulation, be more similar than different. Andrew Leng reads this...

Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style by Constance W. Hassett

I I46 Reviews and present, memory and experience' (p. 236). The two traumas seem only loosely linked. Keats and Heine write out of amelancholy sense of their own belatedness, con demned to reproduce Romantic tropes so thatwhat was once a spontaneous overflow becomes a tissue of quotations. Both write from 'an intrinsically exiled perspective' (p. 43 i),Heine as a Jew,and Keats as aCockney. Pfau succeeds in this, thebook's final section, inbringing together an English and aGerman poet so that thework of each rather strikingly illuminates thework of theother, and the effect is todemonstrate the value of the 'broader European focus' (p. 25) thatPfau brings toRomantic Studies. UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW RICHARD CRONIN Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. By CONSTANCEW. HASSETT. (Victorian Literature and Culture Series) Charlottesville and London: University ofVir giniaPress. 2005. Xiii+278pp. ?26.49. ISBN 978-O-8I39-2339-0. Many critics have noted the reserve, reticence, and quietude implicit inChristina Ros setti's verse, themeswhich tend tobe recast in termsof 'renunciation or endurance or disappointment' (p. I I7). Constance W Hassett's study rethinks theapparent detach ment ofRossetti's style as 'patience', a remarkably insightfulmanceuvre which allows for its alert and discerning argument to unfold.When Hassett writes thatRossetti's 'style ispatient with itself,trusting itsown subtleties ofmanner to achieve resonance and allowing inexplicitness todo itsevocative work' (p. i), she could be describing her own criticalmode-careful, thoughtful, and understated. The book's own style fulfils the rare taskofmaking the reader listen toHassett and indoing so listen toRossetti, both writers encouraging a reciprocity of attention in the reader and poet. By un derlining the importance of close readingwhen approaching Rossetti's work, Hassett produces some brilliant analyses ofwell-known poems, and indoing so avoids simply conceptualizing theircontent as secretive, ambiguous, or unknowable. In Chapter i, forexample, 'GoblinMarket' isunderstood as a poem made up ofmixed desires that are unleashed but then held back by Rossetti's patient style. Laura's depiction as 'a vessel at the launch I When its last restraint is gone' is an image which allows her the experience of surging forward into freedom even as the 'narrative strand warns against', Hassett suggests (p. 25). Such vigilance in reading isdemanded byRossetti inHassett's view, poems such as 'At Home', 'Dream-Land', and 'Remember' being filledwith 'attention' to 'inatten tion' and the consequent perils of rash interpretation (p. 33). Emotionally insulated by her own style,Rossetti is able to explore painful motifs-death, regret, sorrow, frustration,hope deferred-without dwelling on them.As Hassett argues, she 'gladly escapes into [a] soft-edged sadness as away of recasting life's sharper andmore speci ficanxieties' (p. 35). Tracing the impact of predecessors such asHemans and Landon inChapter 2, the book establishes a 'mastery of understatement' (p. io6) at the core of Rossetti's poetry, one that is charged by a 'restrained lyricmomentum' (p. i i6) that allows it to pursue inaccessible and distant themes. Perhaps, Hassett argues, this iswhy 'Who has seen thewind?' remains so compelling, resting as it does on the 'possibility of feeling a power that cannot be seen' (p. 153). Chapter 3's reading of Sing-Song iswonderfully astute in its insistence on the volume's doubleness: its 'richlysustained playfulness' grants itserious content, one that 'values and names the sorrows and pleasures of children' (p. I53) as it teaches them how to listen to verse. This process, the book shows, enables readers to learn the complexity of the kind of restraint characteristic of Rossetti's sonnets, a genre towhich Hassett dedicates a furtherdetailed and considerate chapter. But it is the closing chapter, 'Rossetti's MLR, I02.4, 2007 1147 Finale,' which also proves tobe Hassett's finaleand interpretative peak, a discussion centred on the poet's reading of Revelation, The Face of theDeep (I892), and also Verses (I893). Both texts are formalhybrids, biblical, exegetic, and lyrical,concerned 'not to arrange an argument but toorder the flowof emotions as these are felt in the timing of syllables and verses, the pacing of rhymes, and the overall momentum of stanzas' (p. 232). Allowing herself, and the reader, to experience but not be crushed by theviolence of feeling inherent in religious faith,Rossetti contains thenightmarish...

BOOK REVIEW:Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, by Constance W. Hassett

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style Julie Melnyk (bio) Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, by Constance W. Hassett; pp. xiii + 278. Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005, $39.50, £27.95. Constance W. Hassett has written a first-rate book on Christina Rossetti that treats her not as a woman poet, nor a religious poet, nor even a Pre-Raphaelite poet—though Hassett remains alert to the implications of all these contexts; instead, Hassett discusses Rossetti as, fundamentally, a poet, an artist whose medium is the word and whose style is characterized by "patience." This approach leads the author both to insightful analyses of the influence of other poets on Rossetti's work, and to exciting and illuminating close readings of Rossetti poems both familiar and unfamiliar. Hassett's discussions of unfamiliar works provide the pleasure of rediscovering Rossetti's artistry in little-regarded poems, even as she offers original insights into poems critics discuss most often. Her nuanced reading of "Goblin Market" (1862) provides a good example of such an approach. Hassett focuses (patiently) on style, examining how narrative and lyric strands of the poem intertwine to complicate its treatment of "questions of desire" (15). Through careful attention to the sounds, textures, connotations, and histories of the words Rossetti uses to weave her poem, as well as to the effects she achieves through meter, Hassett offers us a fresh, non-reductive perspective on this often-treated work. Occasionally, a reading that depends on obscure word derivations may strike the reader as fanciful, but even these points are suggestive. Hassett also moves beyond discussion of the single poem to demonstrate how similar issues of reticence and volubility appear in other Rossetti poems, so that the poet's works become mutually illuminating. As part of the "Goblin Market" chapter, for instance, she includes a reading of "Up-Hill" (1862) that simultaneously opens up the apparently simple allegory by focusing [End Page 122] on its treatment of "reticence that masquerades as its opposite" (57) and enhances our understanding of the longer poem's uses of silence. This aesthetic approach to Rossetti's poetry provides fascinating local insights, but it is most valuable and original in the way it reveals the unity of Rossetti's work, early and late, bringing together the playfully oblique "Winter: My Secret" (1862) with the haunting absences of "Remember" (1862); the lyrical nonsense of Sing-Song (1872) with the high seriousness of the late religious verse. Brilliant chapters on Sing-Song and Verses (1893) establish their continuities with and significance within the rest of the Rossetti canon, as well as their artistic merits—though Hassett also demonstrates specific ways in which some of Rossetti's late religious verse no longer seems to have the "patience" for details of "style," sacrificing an "enlivening aesthetic tension" (204) in favor of a preordained ending. But in her discussion of how poems from devotional volumes published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge are transformed when released from their original prose contexts, Hassett provides convincing evidence of Rossetti's continued commitment to aesthetic value and the possibilities of form in her later work. In addition to contextualized close readings of Rossetti's poems, Hassett offers fascinating analyses of Rossetti's relationships with other poets and poetic styles. She reads Monna Innominata (1881) through its interrelations not just with the obvious precursors by Dante and Petrarch but also with the other major nineteenth-century sonnet sequences by D. G. Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, enhancing understanding of how Rossetti transforms the genre. Hassett also reads Rossetti's second sonnet sequence Later Life (1881) in relation to her brother's House of Life (1881), but her discussion of Later Life understates its unity and underlying psychological chronology, treating it as a collection of lyrics rather than a true sequence. Nevertheless, she provides a suggestive account of its relation to Monna Innominata and illuminating readings of several sonnets. Hassett's discussion of the influence of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon (L. E. L.) also offers important insights, particularly in readings of "L. E. L." (1866) and "The Lowest Room" (1875), and she argues convincingly that L. E. L. had the...

Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (review)

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style Roderick McGillis (bio) Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style. By Constance W. Hassett. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 2005. Recently we have seen a number of studies that discuss mainstream literature alongside children's literature, [End Page 211] and this cross-border writing is welcome. Even if we decide that the conventions of children's and young adult literature differ from those of mainstream (for lack of a better term) work, we must recognize that many of our canonical writers crossed over and wrote for the young. The nineteenth century is rich in such writers, from Dickens and Thackery to MacDonald and Gaskell. Novelists often wrote for children as well as for adults. Poets, however, seem less inclined to cross over. As far as I know, the likes of Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Arnold, Swinburne, and so on did not write for children. The recent A Companion to Victorian Poetry (2002) does not contain a chapter on children's verse. The only mentions of children's poetry are in the chapters on "Nonsense" and on "Hymn." Thus, a study such as Hassett's is doubly welcome: it reminds us that Victorians wrote poetry for children, and it notices that one of the period's premier poets practiced her craft for children as well as for adults. In Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, Rossetti emerges as a poet accomplished for the strength of her vision and the intricacy of her form. The poetry she wrote for children contains the same delicacy, or what Hassett calls "patience of style," as does her poetry for adults. The argument has to do with Rossetti's formal grace: "if we wish to understand a poem as a response to an issue, we must treat it not only as a statement but as an action; what it says is inseparable from how it moves" (3). Hassett's book demonstrates just how subtle and meaningful even the most ostensibly simple poem can be. What makes this study invaluable are its demonstrations of close reading. Hassett is attuned to nuance, subtlety, and delicacy. She notices intricate formal beauties, from the working of alliterative affect to the suggestiveness of language. She knows a rhetorical turn when she sees and hears one. For her, poems such as Rossetti's develop organically, like surprising blossoms from familiar shoots. For example, she notices the "watchfulness that underlines" many of Rossetti's images and Rossetti's "empathetic heeding of what evolves" (213). The stanza Hassett scrutinizes here is Joy is but sorrow, While we know It ends tomorrow:- Even so! Joy with lifted veil Shows a face as pale As the fair changing moon so frail and fair. Of course, Hassett acknowledges the paradox of a joy that is not really joy. But her interest is in the movement of the stanza from the opening paradox to the turn at "Even so," to the potentially clichéd unveiling. Hassett goes on to examine the second stanza of this poem, where she lights on the "evolving sound pattern" that "turns pain into a tenderly intricate cleansing" (214). We could press these stanzas harder than Hassett chooses to do, noticing the intertextual connections of the "lifted veil" in Novalis, Shelley, MacDonald, and others, or commenting on Romantic joy, or praising the finely balanced central line with its gentle punning. Like her subject, however, Hassett knows how [End Page 212] to let silences speak. She nicely relates Rossetti's poetic evocation of change to the manner in which her poetry slowly and ever so lightly reveals its meaning. I might cite many instances of Hassett's deft reading, but for our purposes the important aspect of her study deals with children's literature. Rossetti wrote both poetry and prose for children; scholarship usually identifies "Goblin Market," Speaking Likenesses, and Sing-Song as Rossetti's contributions to children's literature. The mixture of prose and verse Rossetti wrote in 1850, Maude, might be included in this list; Hassett mentions Maude once in passing, but she does not consider it in her examination of Rossetti's work. Its absence indicates Hassett's interest in Rossetti as a poet and not...

Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body (review)

Reviewed by: Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body Meegan Kennedy (bio) Victorian Literature and the Anorexic Body, by Anna Krugovoy Silver; pp. x + 220. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, £40.00, $65.00. On December 9, 1869, four nurses commenced watching beribboned little Sarah Jacob, the famous "Welsh fasting girl," to certify that she was indeed refusing to eat. Jacob died eight days later, amid conflicting interpretations of her fast as a miracle or a hysterical bid for attention. The previous year, William Barry Lord had published his guide to The Corset and the Crinoline, recommending a "very sparing diet" (36); five years later, Christina Rossetti published her macabre children's story, Speaking Likenesses, discouraging gluttony. As these examples suggest, gender, food refusal, and the constrained body had accrued complex meanings for Victorian readers. Anna Krugovoy Silver's book seeks to make sense of those meanings and to trace their relation to gendered narratives of food and fasting in Victorian texts. Silver argues that "Victorian gender ideology was . . . built upon an anorexic logic" by valorizing the slim, spiritual, nonsexual, self-disciplined bourgeois woman (14). Silver examines the Victorians' pervasive association of eating and fullness with masculine characters and with feral women, in contrast to the ideal of the frail, selfless, appetiteless woman. Silver's goal is not "retroactively diagnosing particular nineteenth-century women as anorexic" (although she occasionally does), but to show how "aspects of Victorian . . . gender ideology . . . made the development of the disease possible" (3, 27). Her topic requires that she consider familiar canonical texts and gender norms, but Silver keeps her analysis fresh by reading across disciplinary bounds, examining texts ranging from the literary (Charlotte Brontë's Shirley [1849] and Villette [1853], Rossetti's "Goblin Market" [1862], and Bram Stoker's Dracula [1897], for example) to the pedagogical, popular, religious, and scientific (such as the Girl's Own Paper; John Ruskin's mineralogy primer; Rossetti's devotional prose; and a generous representation of beauty manuals, conduct books, and medical cases). While Silver's readings of often-discussed novels like Villette or Dracula are perhaps competent rather than momentous (for example, she concludes that the meaning of the fat body in Dracula is "ever-shifting"), her fascinating chapter on children's literature argues that the logic of anorexia shapes children's stories as well as the pedophilic impulse visible in Ruskin's letters to Kate Greenaway. This chapter draws meaning from even difficult or ambiguous examples, such as her reading of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865), to show how "anorexia becomes a symbolic system in a text that is not directly 'about' anorexia" (71). Silver's most nuanced and persuasive chapter complicates her thesis by arguing that Rossetti's work is shaped by the tradition of religious fasting more than an anorexic logic, given that Rossetti yearns for spiritual fullness even as she critiques earthly, or secular, appetite. Silver makes excellent use of nonliterary primary sources. Reading beauty manuals, she remarks upon how changes in fashion, particularly the developments in corset technology that produce a wasp waist in paradoxical conjunction with plump arms, bust, and hips, participate in the logic she identifies. She is also well informed on Victorian medicine. She discusses the overlap between the holy fast and the hysterical or anorexic fasts recognized by physicians but insists, rightly, on some crucial differences, such as the obsessive nature of the anorexic fast and its fascination with physical appearance. Her analysis of "fasting girls" might, however, have been usefully contextualized by comparison [End Page 285] with the larger category of hysterical afflictions, in the same way that she discusses religious fasting in the context of self-mortification more generally. Fasting was just one of a host of spectacular behaviors exhibited by adolescent girls, including Margaret M'Avoy's claim to see colors with her fingers and Mary Jobson's prophesying (both also associated with medical conditions and, in Jobson's case, refusal to eat). Silver's use of twentieth-century scholarship on anorexia tends to universalize the phenomenon, suggesting an ahistorical definition of anorexia that sits oddly in a book so determined to historicize the practice as one enabled by a particular...

Christina Rossetti's Dialogical Devotion

Although the Bible remains an acknowledged source of influence on Western literature, the Anglo-Catholic poet Christina Rossetti incorporates the divine Word with particular prominence. Throughout this prolific Victorian poet's writing, scriptural imagery is often overt rather than covert, and Rossetti seems content to be shaped by ready-made and authoritative language rather than respond actively to it--an impression that has made many of her modern critics react ambivalently to her religious works. Indeed, critical reactions to Scripture's intertextuality in Rossetti's ceuvre have waxed and waned in favor according to the cultural tides of the time. Although her fervent religiosity was perceived as mark of literary distinction by her nineteenth-century contemporaries, feminist criticism over the past several decades has rewritten the scriptural influence on Rossetti as signifying something else--anything else, that is, besides the powerful hold it had on her imagination. (1) Beginning with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's vision of Rossetti as poet who practiced an aesthetic of renunciation (558), Rossetti scholarship has either rejected the devotional aspects of her writing or examined them as way to recover Rossetti's religion by framing it within more palatable paradigm of power and subversion. (2) Rossetti critics frequently lament her reputation as religious poet and urge us to look beyond her convictions for richer readings. As one writer puts it, While it is possible to impose orthodox religious readings on most of [Rossetti's] poems, such practice smothers undercurrents of doubt and hopelessness which broaden her work and place it in the intellectual company of the major Victorian poets (Sullivan 237). use of the word smother is perhaps just as revealing as the inverse relation implied between orthodox religion and intellect; indeed, the verb pinpoints the prevalent perception of Rossetti's (she was repressed by her religious convictions) and also indicates the kind of suppression to which some critics have subjected Rossetti's more pointedly religious texts. Ironically, the initiative to open up Rossetti's works has locked her into the position of someone who must be recuperated from her faith. Recent Rossetti scholarship has begun to emphasize rather than elide the devotional aspect, granting critical space in which Rossetti, as Diane D'Amico puts it, can be a woman poet of faith and not writer whose is sublimation for something else (9). Beginning in 1994 with Linda Peterson's Restoring the Book: Typological of the PRB, there has been renewed interest in Rossetti's engagement with Christian thought, especially in how she can be part of the community of women who are readers of, and writers about, the sacred scriptures (212). Moreover, the often-neglected part of Rossetti's literary corpus, her devotional prose, is receiving fresh attention. Critical studies such as Lynda Palazzo's The and the Bible: Christina Rossetti's Feminist Hermeneutics and Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology explore her role as female interpreter of Scripture; in addition, David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood's introduction to Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti gives prominent place to her devotional prose. Palazzo establishes Rossetti as reader of the Bible and writes, It is not [...] her courage we need to admire [...] but the razor[-]sharp intellect and vision that identified in contemporary theological developments the potential for feminine and feminist theology (The Poet 6). Although Palazzo's book is valuable for acknowledging Rossetti's active engagement with Scripture, her insistence on constructing the writer solely as feminist reader seems to set unnecessary boundaries between Rossetti's prose and poetry. (3) Likewise, Kent and Stanwood's otherwise instructive introduction limits the connection between the two genres to only her religious poetry. …

Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (review)

Reviewed by: Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History Elizabeth Gargano (bio) Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. By Lorraine Janzen Kooistra. Athens: Ohio UP2002 In 1979, R. W. Crump published the first installment of the three-volume Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti, ultimately completed in 1990. Along with The Letters of Christina Rossetti (the first volume of which appeared in 1997), this impressive work signaled a new era in Rossetti studies. While her flamboyantly controversial poem Goblin Market never ceased to attract readers both inside and outside the academy, Rossetti's literary reputation had suffered from years of critical neglect. Once overshadowed by her illustrious brother, the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, this neglected female "pre-Raphaelite" has emerged as a talented writer for children and adults, a shrewd critic of the gender roles and class assumptions of her day, and a versatile figure who bridges gaps between "popular" and "literary" modes of writing. In her comprehensive Christina Rossetti and Illustration, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra traces the history of Rossetti's changing literary fortunes over the last two centuries, offering a fascinating portrait of Rossetti's career, as well as the economic realities and aesthetic assumptions that have fostered changing attitudes toward her work. Kooistra describes her book as "a case study" of Rossetti's writing within the context of Victorian and twentieth-century publishing practices (2). She also details the impact of such practices on our assumptions about texts and textuality. Kooistra's analysis offers an additional focus, investigating Rossetti's texts as visual objects whose perceived meaning may be altered by their design and illustrations. The "premise" of her exploration, she emphasizes, "is that...image, text, and book...must be studied relationally" (7). Examining Rossetti's writings through the lens of her "materialist aesthetic"(8), Kooistra acknowledges her debt to Jerome McGann's 1991 work, The Textual Condition. McGann's seminal analysis challenged the once traditional view of literary texts as fixed entities whose "content" is determined solely by the "best" version of an author's work. His argument typified a changing critical climate, as scholars moved away from the notion of a single definitive text toward an acceptance of multiple "variants" reflecting the historical and material conditions that produced them. Kooistra's methodology illuminates in previously unexplored ways the complexity and range of Rossetti's achievement. Rossetti's highly cultivated visual imagination led her to plan her books as exquisite artifacts. For more than a year, Kooistra notes, she delayed the initial publication of her narrative poem, The Prince's Progress, in order to include the woodcut illustrations promised by her brother, Dante Gabriel. Whenever possible, Rossetti selected and collaborated with her illustrators in order to shape her books' final appearance. Foregrounding links between Rossetti's publications over the course of two centuries, Kooistra organizes her subject matter into two parallel sections. "Victorian Productions" details the creation, publication, and reception of Rossetti's works in the nineteenth century. "Twentieth-Century Reproductions" tracks later incarnations of Rossetti's writings—most notably Goblin Market—not only in illustrated editions, but also in theatrical productions that Kooistra sees as "a new form of illustration operating live in three dimensions" (270). She also devotes her attention to the digital images that create a "Virtual Christina" on numerous Rossetti websites (252). Each section of her book examines three major categories of Rossetti's work: volumes of poetry for adults (often collectors' items featuring beautifully produced artwork), children's books, and devotional writing. This categorical approach is undoubtedly useful to readers with a special interest in one aspect of Rossetti's varied oeuvre. It does, however, necessitate a certain amount of repetition, as some genre-straddling works appear in more than one section. Kooistra's analysis of two works for younger audiences, Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book and Speaking Likenesses, is of special interest to students of children's literature. While both works were illustrated by the talented Arthur Hughes, the resulting books differed dramatically. When composing poems for Sing-Song, Rossetti had sketched rough illustrations that contextualized her brief and sometimes cryptic rhymes; her sketches later served as the basis for Hughes' evocative and amusing illustrations. Pleased by the...

Re-Reading Sisterhood in Christina Rossetti's "Noble Sisters" and "Sister Maude"

This essay examines the representation of women's relationships in two Christina Rossetti poems, "Noble Sisters" and "Sister Maude." Both poems were composed after "Goblin Market" and, notably, after she had begun volunteering at Highgate Penitentiary, a home for fallen women. Considering these poems in the context of Rossetti's work at Highgate reveals that her beliefs about the potential of women's communities changed after her experience working there. By noting this shift in her representation of women's relationships, this essay argues for a reconsideration of the primacy of "Goblin Market" in estimations of Rossetti's politics.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lost

Why did the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti come to dominate the cultural geography of England between 1850 and 1910? And why, having attained that kind of eminence, did Rossetti's star decline so precipitously with the advent of Modernism? Finally, what is there about Rossetti's work and its historical aftermath that makes these questions important ones to ask? The cultural and aesthetic problems raised by those questions are the subject of this fascinating book. Jerome McGann, an eminent authority on Rossetti, demonstrates the programmatic aims of Rossetti's innovative multimedia work by focusing on two issues, one philosophical and one cultural. First, McGann shows how in Rossetti's work high-order thinking processes are modeled and executed as aesthetic practices. Second, from Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite 'art of the inner standing point' McGann argues that Rossetti forces a revision of the cultural norms commonly used for evaluating artistic success and failure.

The Afterlife of Christina Rossetti by Alison Chapman (review)

Reviews Alison Chapman. TheAfterlife of ChristinaRossetti. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. 213 pp. Alison Chapman's TheAfterlife of Christina Rossetti argues that the author is the central problem of representation and that Christina Rossetti is an effect, or more appropriately, an after-effect of literary and biographical life writing. Examined as a semiotic structure, the literary signature becomes a trope of ambivalence, signifying the poet's presence as absence and the poetry's meaning as inaccessible. Yet Chapman's analysis of the author as a process and product of representation is also a solid historical study, offering a subtle and sophisticated consideration of figures of loss and death that figure prominently in the reception history of Rossetti's work in relation to the afterlife as a trope in Rossetti's own writing and public selfimage . Chapman thus draws a significant connection between the biographical history and the poetry by noting that "subjectivities in Rossetti's poetry repeat the vacillation [found in the biographies] between presence and absence, accessibility and inaccessibility, which offers a figure for reading the signature Christina Rossetti" (6). Rossetti emerges here not only as a signature and cultural artefact but also as a model for a different kind of poetic subjectivity. Chapman's study of the representation of the life aims at a reconfiguration of reading practices that would allow access to the referent "without either reifying its presence or insisting on its absence." This would be, she argues, "reading in other ways, other wise"(27). One of the merits of this book thus lies in Chapman's ability to detect mutually constitutive structures of figuration and to explore their larger significance. For in approaching Rossetti from the perspective of the history of authorial representation, Chapman situates her study within the larger question of the relation between history and literature. Moreover, she insists that the relation between history and literature is all the more acute in the study of Victorian women's poetry, as that body of writing emphasizes tensions between feminism and new historicism . Chapman not only outlines and analyzes the methodological and critical complications arising from excavation of dead authors as 1 08volume 28 number 2 Reviews personality and individual presence, but shows how Rossetti's own subversions of the sentimental tradition, which defines the proper mode of expression for women poets as confessional and personal and thereby inherently autobiographical, raise questions about the project of recovery. Chapman thus seeks to break the cycle of nineteenth-century autobiographical readings of women's poetry, which, she argues, "in a self-sustaining circularity, produce the life as evidence for textual interpretation and the text as evidence for biography" (66). Consequently , she spends some time in the early chapters of the book questioning central premises of the project of recovery and new historicist methodologies for understanding authorship and demonstrating how they reproduce the very ideology that the poetry critiques. Rossetti herself self-consciously resists the ideology of self-representation, Chapman observes, and thus her poetry severely complicates historicist acts of interpretation. Chapters one and two address historical methodologies in terms of the gaze and the voice respectively. Chapman insightfully offers photography as a visual analogy to the process by which historically oriented approaches search for an authentic biographical subject. Both biography and photography, according to Chapman, are predicated upon an illusion of the presence of the referent "out there" and their focus on the object makes the referent into a fetish. Later in the book, Chapman will return to the analogy between photography and biography to parallelJulia Margaret Cameron's "out of focus" photography with Rossetti's poetic commentary on her brother's aesthetics of the feminine. In their shared interest in the spectral quality of their feminine subjects, representing them as excessively feminine, fleeting and posthumous, female poet and photographer alike unsettle the male gaze and return the look. Voice similarly functions as guarantor of presence. In lyric poetry such as Rossetti's, voice works as a metonymy in the nineteenth century, and persists today, collapsing woman into experience into text, enabling the lyric voice to be taken as the ultimate indicator of the historical personage. Chapman acknowledges that voice is heavily invested with the...

The Fruit of Charity: Comus and Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market

fascinated Christina Rossetti, who explored these same concerns in her own poetry and devotional prose.1 Not surprisingly, then, much critical discussion has been devoted to the influence of Paradise Lost on Rossetti's work, particularly on her most famous narrative poem, Goblin Market, But critics have persistently misunderstood influence on Rossetti, claiming that in Goblin Market Rossetti either reinscribes an oppressive Miltonic injunction against female creativity, or that she needs to radically revise Milton in order to celebrate female creativity and spirituality. This essay examines how another important work by Milton his 1634 Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, commonly known as Comus inspires Goblin Market I suggest that masque has a direct bearing on the meaning and structure of Rossetti's poem, especially on its feminist implications, and that Rossetti's most original and creative appropriation of Milton is to be found in Goblin Market These texts share a similar climactic event: a restorative, redemptive ritual that one woman performs for another. Both works are concerned with the virtues of chastity and charity, and both explore these virtues by using a female Christ figure whose divine power derives from her experience of a violent assault. In The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar devote an entire chapter to Milton's bogey a phrase (borrowed from Virginia Woolf's A Room of Ones Own [1929]) that they use to describe Milton as the primary patriarchal figure of oppression and Bloomian anxiety for women writers. Their critical formulation of Milton is worth quoting at length:

'Transfigured to His Likeness': Sensible Transcendentalism in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'

Announcing their primacy, Christina Rossetti's fairy tales anchor her first two collections of poetry. 'Goblin Market' and 'The Prince's Progress' begin and title the volumes of 1862 and 1866, and 'Maiden-Song' follows directly on 'The Prince's Progress' in 1866; these three poems inaugurate, in their original order, the 1875 and 1890 'new and enlarged' editions of her poems. Their positioning at the beginnings of sequences that conclude with 'Devotional Pieces' suggests that these texts, for all their priority, belong to the more secularized band of Rossetti's poetic spectrum. Indeed, in her concordance The Bible and the Poetry of Christina Rossetti, Nilda Jiménez finds no scriptural echoes in any of these poems, an absence truly remarkable given the ubiquity of scriptural resonance in Rossetti's work. Her brother William Michael speculated that removal of Biblical references and diction from Christina Rossetti's poems would reduce her pages 'to something approaching a vacuum': 'the Bible was so much her rule of life and faith that it had almost become a part of herself, and she uttered herself accordingly' (Preface, Golden Treasury Poems, xii). Despite the appearance of a biblical vacuum in her fairy tales, however, they do in truth call up Scripture and speak Rossetti's Christian devotion through and through, but in ways, it may be, inapparent to our usual apprehensions of religious utterance. The alleged 'godlessness' of 'Goblin Market' in particular recommends that fairy tale to Germaine Greer, who otherwise dismisses much of Rossetti's verse as pious nonsense (x, vii, xxii); but even Jerome McGann, who contra Greer sensitively confirms the Christian 'machinery' of the poem, locates its metaphorical operations on 'secular grounds' (237–8, 247, 251).

The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Modes of Self-Expression

Note Introduction: Poets and Pre-Raphaelites 1. Dante draws an angel 2. A man of his time 3. The inner world 4. 'Venus Verticordia' 5. The importance of Dante 6. Sonnets and self-expression 7. Matters of temperament Appendices Index of Rossetti's works General index.

'Ah, Poor Jenny's Case': Rossetti and the Fallen Woman/Flower

Although the period of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848–53) was one of the most productive in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's creative career, painting pictures such as Ecce Ancilla Domini! and writing poems such as 'Dante at Verona' did not occupy all his time and energy in the late forties and early fifties. In the spring of 1850 he met Elizabeth Siddai, a milliner's assistant whose effect on him was apparently so immediate and pronounced that, as he told Ford Madox Brown later, 'when he first met her, he felt his destiny was defined.' Within a very short time Rossetti was deeply in love with this ingenuously beautiful girl, probably seeing in her his own personal version of the Beatrice whose flesh-and-blood reality he had always professed. In 1851 Miss Siddal sat for Beatrice in the watercolour illustration of Beatrice, Meeting Dante at a Marriage Feast, Denies him her Salutation,; but, as G.H. Fleming remarks, 'in real life she ... was somewhat less ethereal than Dante's Beatrice, and probably was denying her lover nothing.' There is, of course, an element of speculation in Fleming's remark. Nevertheless, if the lovers' relationship, particularly after Rossetti moved in 1852 from his parents' house on Charlotte Street to a studio in Chatham Place, near Blackfriars Bridge, was somewhat other than 'Dantesque: it is plaUSible to speculate that there was a biographical basis for the 'great concern for female purity' which, as David Sonstroem, among others, has pointed out, enters Rossetti's work in 1853 and does not leave it for many years thereafter.

Dante Rossetti's Beata Beatrix and the New Life

Dante Gabriel Rossetti developed into a deeply spiritual and sensitive painter of love in an age obsessed with public moralism, moralism that often proscribed the expression of intimate feelings and personal philosophy. He clothed his loves, with all their problematic developments, in medieval and Renaissance dress which elevated them to a distant Romantic ideal, yet he maintained a maximum of passion and sensuality. He nurtured love in an environment of music, flowers, and gentility appropriate to cultivated beauty until distinctions between his life and art were blurred, but the creations that resulted were neither mythical nor mundane. What in lesser artists was maudlin, in Rossetti's works reached the realm of ideal beauty and spiritual ecstasy. Such at least was the achievement of the first decade of his artistic career (1848–1858), the decade in which his most ardent work was done. It is in this period that one of his most compelling and mystical paintings was conceived, Beata Beatrix (Fig. 1).