Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti wrote Goblin Market, refused two men she loved on religious grounds, and is now read as the best English poet of her generation. She was the youngest child of an exiled Italian patriot in London, sister to Dante Gabriel and William Michael, and she sat for her brother's first paintings - the Virgin in the Girlhood of Mary Virgin is her face. She began publishing in the Pre-Raphaelite magazine The Germ under a pseudonym. Goblin Market, published in 1862, is a poem about two sisters and the fruit sold by goblin men that has been read as a fairy tale, a Christian allegory, an account of addiction and an erotic poem, and sustains all of them. She was a devout High Anglican, broke an engagement with the painter James Collinson when he returned to Rome, and refused the scholar Charles Cayley over doctrine; she volunteered for over a decade at a refuge for former prostitutes in Highgate. Her devotional prose is substantial and little read. In the Bleak Midwinter is hers. Graves' disease disfigured her from 1872 and she lived reclusively; she died of cancer. Her first collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was illustrated by her brother and made her reputation immediately. Remember and Song, When I am dead my dearest are among the most anthologised short poems in English. Sing-Song, a book of nursery rhymes, was published in 1872. Virginia Woolf wrote an essay on her centenary that placed her above her brother, and twentieth-century critics from the 1970s onward rebuilt her reputation almost entirely. Her brother William Michael edited the posthumous poems and wrote the memoir, with omissions.

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