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The Review of English Studies Advance Access published online on October 21, 2009
The Review of English Studies, doi:10.1093/res/hgp055
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press 2009; all rights reserved

The Advent of Christina Rossetti

John Woolford

University of Sheffield


  Abstract

This essay examines influences at work on Christina Rossetti's first publications, in particular to the representations of her undertaken by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, beginning with his use of her for the Virgin Mary in two early paintings. I argue that she must have found these images in some ways repressive and coercive, and that her protest is registered in the first instance in her downplaying of the importance of a component of them, the lily, in her poetry. The essay then examines the broader case of Gabriel's representations of her in the 1857 Moxon selection from the poems of Tennyson, and her response to these in her major poem, ‘From House to Home’. I argue that an important element of the iconography of this poem derives from, in particular, Gabriel's illustrations for ‘The Palace of Art’, and that its effect is to claim for herself the freedom to use and subvert an original that he exercised freely in his own work but denied to her. I go on to examine her influences from Tennyson and the Romantic poets.


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