Christina Rossetti, selected poems

Rossetti's works

  • Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems, text by R.W. Crump, notes and  introduction by Betty S. Flowers (London: Penguin, 2001)

This edition of Rossetti's poetry is the most comprehensive. It contains all of Rossetti's published and published poetry and some helpful contextual information.

  • Christina Rossetti: Poems and Prose, ed. by Jan Marsh (London: Everyman, 1994)

This edition contains a selection of Rossetti's most well-known poems, several of her short stories and some significant extracts from her devotional prose. It also contains a useful summary of the critical reception of Rossetti's poetry.

Biographies

(See Poetry of Christina Rossetti > Critical approaches > Early twentieth century approaches)

  • Bell, Mackenzie, Christina Rossetti: A Biographical and Critical Study, 4th edn. (1898; New York: Haskell House Pub. Ltd, 1971)
  • Marsh, Jan, Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994)
  • Packer, Lona Mosk, Christina Rossetti (Berkeley; Cambridge: University of California Press : Cambridge University Press, 1963)

Critical books and articles mentioned in the guide

  • Arseneau, Mary, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Antony Harrison, eds., The Culture of Christina Rossetti: Female Poetics and Victorian Contexts (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1999)
  • Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Women Writer and the Nineteenth Century Imagination, 2nd edn. (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2000)
  • Lootens, Tricia, Lost Saints: Silence, Gender and Victorian Literary Canonization (Charlottesville & London: University Press of Virginia, 1996)
  • Mason, Emma, 'Christina Rossetti and the Doctrine of Reserve', Journal of Victorian Culture, 7 (2002), 196-219
  • Palazzo, Lynda, Christina Rossetti's Feminist Theology (Crosscurrents in Religion and Culture; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002)
  • Tennyson, G.B., Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode, (Cambridge, Mass. London: Harvard University Press, 1981)

Websites

Not all website contain accurate or relevant material. The following are reputable and useful for a wider appreciation of Rossetti's life, times and works:

The Victorian Web contains a lot of useful contextual information about the Victorian period. It also has a whole section on Christina Rossetti which includes biographical information and several commentaries on her poetry.

This is a free online archive of Anglican texts, many of which are out of print. Including all the Tracts for the Times and many sermons written by the Tractarians, it is a valuable resource if you wish to contextualise some of Rossetti's poems within the framework of the debates occurring in the contemporary church with which she was familiar. The site also includes many poems by Tractarian leaders such as John Keble, Isaac Williams and John Henry Newman.

You will have to sign up to use this website but you can have a 48 hour free trial period in which you can browse Rossetti's letters. The digital edition included on the website incorporates the complete text of the 4-volume print edition, The Letters of Christina Rossetti, 4 vols, ed. by Antony Harrison (Charlottesville; London: University Press of Virginia, 1997-2004).

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