Learning Not to Be First: The Life of Christina Rossetti (Oxford Lives)

Christina Rossetti was the youngest of four children. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she suffered the tyranny of a loving family, being restrained by the "police surveillance" of her sister Maria and the goodness of their mother. Although she and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the "two storms", she curbed her passionate nature, and a love of life was replaced in her work initially by the bitterness of the lonely and ultimately by the conviction of the religious. Comparing her situation with that of contemporaries Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson, this biography examines the effects of Victorian social and religious convention on the life and work of the "High Priestess of Pre-Raphaelitism".