General context

Question 1

St. Mary Magdalene Penintiary, Highgate

Answer 1

• in early 1859, Rossetti began volunteering at the St. Mary Magdalene Penintiary - a charitable institution for the reclamation of ‘fallen women’.
• ‘An Apple Gathering’ / ‘Maude Clare’ were written before this but demonstrate a prior interest within ‘fallen women’.
• ‘Goblin Market’ composed in the same year she started this work

Question 2

Rossetti’s education

Answer 2

Christina and her sister received their educations entirely from their mother. May link to Our Mothers - a dedication to women as mothers and their dedication, perseverance and virtue amidst struggle.

Question 3

Browning vs. Rossetti

Answer 3

Readers have generally considered Rosetti’s poetry to be less intellectual, less political and less varied than Browning’s.

Conversely, though, many have acknowledged Rossetti’s greater lyric gift, with her poetry often displaying perfection in diction, tone and form under the guise of utter simplicity.

Question 4

Christina and Dante Gabriel

Answer 4

their father called the pair the ‘two storms’ of the family.

Question 5

Counselling her niece

Answer 5

Christina was given to tantrums and fractious behaviour in her younger years. When she was older, counselling a niece with similar tendencies, she emphasised the importance of learning self-control.

Question 6

William Michael’s memoir

Answer 6

in his memoir, Christina’s brother laments the thwarting of her high spirits; as an adult she was considered by many to be overscrupulous and excessively restrained.

Question 7

the Oxford Movement in London, 1840s

Answer 7

• the Rossettis shifted from an Evangelical to an Anglo-Catholic orientation and this outlook influenced virtually all of Christina’s poetry. She emphasises her belief in the ability for all individuals to have a relationship with God, and her poems are littered with imagery associated with the Church pre-reformation.
• the main aim of the movement was to rehabilitate the dignity of the Church against the interference of the State and politics

Question 8

Religion in Rosetti’s work

Answer 8

More than half of her poetic output was devotional, and the work of her later years in both poetry and prose are almost exclusively so. After the publication of Sing Song and the recovery from her illness, Rossetti turned almost exclusively to devotional writing.

Question 9

Recurring themes in her poetry

Answer 9

• The inconstancy of human love
• the vanity of earthly pleasures
• renunciation
• individual unworthiness
• the perfection of divine love

Question 10

1845 Collapse of health

Answer 10

sometimes believed symptoms to have been psychosomatic, rescuing Rosetti from having to work as a governess like her mother and sister.

Question 11

The relevance of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Answer 11

• During this period Dante Gabriel was gathering around him the circle of young men who named themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
• Although he assumed that Christina would participate, she was never a member of this artistic and literary group
• she even refused to have her work read aloud in her absence at its meetings
• Nevertheless, her poetry has been described as “Pre-Raphaelite” in its rich and precise natural detail, its use of symbol, its poignancy, and its deliberate medievalism. It is plausible to suggest that many of her poems function as verbal Pre-Raphaelite portraits.
• recent critics have remarked that the Pre-Raphaelite elements in Rossetti’s work have been overemphasized at the expense of noticing the Tractarian influences

Question 12

James Collinson

Answer 12

• proposed marriage to Rossetti in 1848
• refused, giving Collinson’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism. he promptly returned to the Church of England, proposed a second time, and was accepted.
• ended in 1850 as Collinson reverted to Catholicism
• poems she wrote at the height of her love for him (like Remember) have some of the most poignant lines about the immenence and inescapability of death.

Question 13

conflicting identities

Answer 13

female, poet, Anglo-Catholic

Question 14

Maude: A Story For Girls and being a ‘woman-poet’

Answer 14

The main conflict of the narrative revolves around Maude’s experience of the incompatibility of ladylike behaviour and poetic achievement.
Like the author, Maude is torn between pride in her work and moral qualms about that pride.

Question 15

Finanical crisis

Answer 15

The Rossetti family were victims of a financial crisis, so much so that they had to move from Charlotte Street to Camden Town.

Question 16

The Crimean War

Answer 16

Christina volunteered to join Florence Nightingale’s nurses but was turned down.

Question 17

Prostitution

Answer 17

was considred to be a social evil in Victorian times

Question 18

Reworking poems

Answer 18

Rossetti often only changed a word or two before publication. But, in the case of major revisions, they took the form of the deletion of whole stanzas, sometimes even being reduced to half of their original length.

this is the case for ‘Echo’ and ‘Maude Clare’

economy of expression is a key signifier of Rossetti’s work and results in meaning being more suggestive than explicit.

Question 19

why read Rossetti?

Answer 19

we find profound emotional conflict and complexity in her poetry, in addition to an endlessly creative lyric art. she resists easy categorisation - never the didactic or complacent Victorian voice - and rather seeks to express intense emotions and passions.

Question 20

Rossetti’s originality

Answer 20

Rossetti takes the traditional poetic form - the sonnet as a love poem - and uses it in radically individual ways.
We also see this originality in her tendency to challenge and tease her reader. We expect lyric poetry to be confessional and revealing but Rossetti can consciously craft an enigmatic metaphor which she refuces to elucidate.

Question 21

Population of Britain

Answer 21

at her birth in 1830, the population was 12 million
by her death it had surpassed 30 million

Question 22

Up-Hill and At Home

Answer 22

written on the same day in 1858 (28 years old)

Question 23

industrial revolution

Answer 23

Eric Hobsbawm (famous historian that looked at the rise of Capitalism etc.) held that the Industrial Revolution began in Britain in the 1780s and was not fully felt until the 1830s or 1840s. Rossetti was born in 1830, thus she had grown up seeing the full effects of the industrial revolution on the society around her.

Question 24

W.J. Courthope’s highly influential essay, ‘The Latest Developments of Literary Poetry’ (1872)

Answer 24

W.J. Courthope’s description of Pre-Raphaelite poetry excludes the work of Christina Rossetti because of his emphasis on the brethren’s clearly subversive or antiorthodox traits. He perceives them as a disquieting avant-garde. Although, as we shall see, social subversiveness (but of different kinds) is a characteristic common to Christina Rossetti’s vers

Question 25

poetry in the Victorian period

Answer 25

there were new, avant-garde tendencies arising in Victorian poetry and the arts during the second half of the century in particular, as demonstrated by the PRB.

Question 26

Edmund Gosse on Rossetti

Answer 26

Gosse insisted that she is “a writer to whom we may not unreasonably expect that students of English literature in the twenty-fourth century” may look back at

Question 27

Rossetti’s letter to Augusta Webster explaining her refusal to support women’s suffrage

Answer 27

Rossetti refused to support women’s suffrage on the grounds of the patriarchal doctrines, values and hierarchy of Christian orthodoxy, but also noted in her letter that “if female rights are sure to be overborne for lack of female voting influence, then I confess […] that female M.P’s are only right and reasonable.”

Question 28

the original transcript of Maude Clare

Answer 28

In the original manuscript poem, Maude Clare appears without question as the most sympathetic figure in the work, a woman betrayed and victimized by a capricious lover who chooses to marry for money. The same cannot necessarily be said about the final, pruned version of the poem where Rosetti’s contemporary readers especially may have felt Maude vainly upstages the couple, where Nell as the ideal and humble ‘good Victorian housewife’ and Thomas’ evident shame make her appear all the more arrogant.

Question 29

medieval French love poetry

Answer 29

In many of her “secular” poems, obstacled earthly love is often transposed into divine love, eros into agape, as it also is in the works of Petrarch and many of his troubadour precursors. (seen in Twice)

Question 30

aestheticism

Answer 30

movement (17th/18th century) preoccupied by the fleeting beauty of objects on earth

Question 31

the period of Pax Britannica in Victorian Britain

Answer 31

• the golden age of British Imperialism
• the nation prospered from capitalist wealth, international trade, territorial conquests, industrial boom, scientific and technological advancements
• as social mobility increased, there was a distinct rise in bourgeois values; hard work, material comfort, social stability and propriety
• writing and publishing were no longer simply literary activities but commercial ventures
• the birth of a thriving literary marketplace

Question 32

growing religious factionalism between the Anglican and Catholic church

Answer 32

poems during this era inevitably dealt with themes of doubt and loss of faith

Question 33

social expectations of moral righteousness and propriety

Answer 33

restraint and abstinence were promoted as aspirational qualities

Question 34

Darwinism

Answer 34

theory of evolution challenged a long-held belief in people being descended from Adam and Eve. this contributed to growth in religious skepticism