Christina Rosetti born (1830 - 1894)

About:

Christina Rosetti was the youngest of the prolifically talented brood of the professor of Italian at King’s College, London, Gabriele Rosetti. Her brother was the leading pre-Raphaelite artist Dante Gabriel Rosetti and her two further siblings also became writers. She was born in London in 1830 and her father’s failing health during the 1840s led to financial hardship for the family and a nervous breakdown for Christina when she was 14. Led by her mother’s already devout Anglicanism, she turned to the evangelical arm of the Church of England for solace, an influence which would shine through her poetry and stay with her throughout her life.

She became engaged to the linguist Charles Cayley but broke off the engagement because of his reversion to Catholicism. She gave up playing Chess because she found she loved winning too much. This strict vein of devotion lines her poetry, nowhere more so than in her first published collection ‘Goblin Market and Other Poems’ (1862). The beguilingly simple tale of two sisters and their progress through temptation to redemption was highly acclaimed on its release.

She lived with her mother all her life and continued to write devotional and childrens’ poetry. She was much concerned with the lives of prostitutes in London and spent much of her time working in various hostels for the women, and young girls, in London, until her health, (she suffered from recurrent bouts of Graves’ Disease) forced her into a semi-secluded life at home in the 1880s. She had been much affected by her brother Dante’s breakdown in 1872 and when he died in 1882 she more or less retired from life until her own death of cancer, in 1894.