Christina Rossetti is one of the most significant voices in Victorian poetry. She is best known for her poetry collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, though her other works—The Price’s Progress and other Poems (1866), Singsong: a Nursery Rhyme Book (1872), Seek and Find (1879), and Called to be Saints (1881) merited enough acclaim for her to be considered as Tennyson’s successor as Poet Laureate.
Christina Rossetti was the daughter of Italian poet and scholar Gabriele Rossetti (1783-1854), though she was born and raised in London. Her parents’ love for art, and the intellectual circles they moved in, left a strong creative influence on the Rossetti children. She and her three siblings were all writers, and her brother Dante Gabriel was also a painter. She modeled for his picture, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849), as well as for the paintings and drawings for her family’s Pre-Raphaelite friends. Her family also helped introduce her talent to the literary world: her first poems were published by grandfather’s printing press, and her brother’s pre-Raphaelite journal, The Germ, featured seven of her earliest works.
Rossetti’s poetry is known for its rich religious undertones, reflecting her own spirituality and devotion to the church, and the influences of philosophers like Augustine and Thomas à Kempis and the metaphysical poet John Donne.
Between penning poems, Rossetti worked as a governess. In the 1880’s she developed a thyroid disease that left her an invalid. She continued to write, leading to the collections A Pageant and Other Poems (1881) and The Face of the Deep (1892) before she passed away from cancer on December 29, 1894.