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Surrounded Determination and Poetry: The Life of Christina Rosetti

Hännah Schlaudt

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn’ to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labor you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

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She shunned her suitors, gazed darkly out of her brother’s paintings, and scribbled poems full of deep musings and earnest reverence for Christ. Living a life of self-denial and intense piety, Christina Rossetti is often portrayed as a gloomy religious fanatic who rejected love and the world. Having much in common with other significant female writers (Austen, the Brontës, Dickinson, and others) in her isolated life as a spinster, she could easily be labeled as merely an old maid who wrote a great deal. Yet she’s deeper than that, and her writings are filled with an earnest love for her Savior and a delight in beauty that could hardly be found in the writings of a religious ascetic.

Christina Rossetti was born in London on December 5, 1830. The youngest of four children born to the Italian Gabriele and Frances Rossetti, she studied at home under her mother’s tutelage, and began writing at the age of seven.

Her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, was one of her dearest friends and she posed for many of his intensely lovely paintings. He depicted her several times as the virgin Mary, her eyes gazing earnestly into the distance, and a seriousness of soul hovering about her seated figure.

However, she grew to hold dear the firm Anglican convictions of her mother, and became gradually reclusive and disillusioned with the world. Her earnestness about her beliefs led her to a life of purposeful self-denial; at one point she gave up chess only because she enjoyed winning so much. This has caused her to be frequently portrayed as a stern ascetic, but the joy she found in beauty and in her Savior contrast starkly with this image. Christina was not an ascetic, but a pilgrim earnestly seeking the things of her Master’s kingdom over the pleasures of the world.

Engaged at eighteen to her brother’s friend, James Collison of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, she startled everyone when she broke off the engagement two years later because of Collison’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Years later she would also reject Charles Cayley, because, as she said, “[I had] enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian.” A great deal of speculation surrounds her rejection of Cayley — many think that she truly loved him — but it is much in keeping with her character to mull over a desire and to eventually surrender it, in order to obey the Lord and to keep her focus fixed on Him. She decided that it was more important to be equally yoked with a fellow believer of the same theological convictions than to satisfy her society’s expectations or to submit to the urges of her flesh. As a strong Christian, she knew that the Lord would bless her for her obedience and faithfulness to His Word, and that His will for her was perfect. There was no doubt in her mind that she was doing the right thing to break off these engagements. To obey Christ was supreme in her mind, as it ought to be for all followers of the Lord.

Her reclusive tendencies and a mysterious sickness that would nag her until her death caused her to retire almost completely from society. She continued to write, and her work was marked by a strong faith and serious mindset. In 1862, she published her first volume of poetry, Goblin Market and Other Poems. This was to become the most well-known of her writings, and as she wrote more and published her poems in various magazines, she became quite respected in the literary world of her time. At one point she was considered to succeed Alfred, Lord Tennyson as poet laureate of England, but Alfred Austin was chosen instead.

The rich descriptions and vivid imagery of her poetry have led to her being portrayed as a Pre-Raphaelite artist, but while she was in the social circle of the Brotherhood and painted word-pictures in her poems equally vibrant to their paintings, the core values of her poetry were her strong faith in God, and a willingness to die to herself for the furthering of His work. A hinted-at unrequited love shrouds her reclusive life in wistful mystery. The Brotherhood valued rich beauty above all else, and often sacrificed wisdom’s course of living to feed their hunger for pleasure and beauty — something Christina was set against in every way.

In her later years, as she continued to write and publish, she also became very socially active. She saw the effects of the Industrial Revolution on the poor of Victorian England, and her heart ached for the children in the factories, and especially for the women ruined and abused and abandoned by the subculture of prostitution and male chauvinism. For ten years, she volunteered at a home for rescued prostitutes, and helped to care for the broken lives and hearts there. There was heartache and brokenness in their lives, but there was dignity beneath the shame, and Christina Rossetti saw it and wanted them to be noticed, to be cared about and ministered to, and to be redeemed.

Her poetry was frequently written as if someone besides herself was speaking, and more and more often the voices in her poems became that of abandoned or fallen women. Yet, the nobility of an abused woman shines bright in her poems, warming the heart with compassion for the brokenness there. The frailty unveiled by Rossetti is strikingly beautiful — the women are victims, but they have hope of redemption and that hope gives them both a power and a vulnerability that fascinates the reader.

When her brother Dante Gabriel died in 1882, she was devastated, and her emotional troubles increased. For twelve more years she lived on quietly, seeing few people and writing much. Her physical health, never strong, grew steadily worse, and she died in December of 1894 of cancer.

As Christians, in this society of self-indulgence where pursuing our own desires to their fullest end is the status quo, we can take heart from Rossetti’s life. Christina sacrificed romance and her fleshly desires in order to seek the face of God and His will first. Her writing displays a brilliant, yet very human, faith in the Lord. She struggled and was weak, but her hope was in the One who is always true, and that never wavered. When you read her poems, savor the lilting beauty of the words and learn from the rich faith that is so clearly read in between each of her lines — be encouraged and delighted, and let her faith in the Lord strengthen your own.

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The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of artists founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his friends. They rebelled against certain art styles popular in their time to produce fresh, beautifully romantic art. They were strongly influenced by Romanticism and held to these four tenets:

1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote;
4. And, most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.