The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition: Volume I

Christina Rossetti is known as the greatest female poet of the Victorian age. By the time of her death in 1898 she had written eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Scholars have long felt the need for a complete collection of her work, yet, until now, there has been none. In this projected three-volume set, R.W. Crump will present all of Rossetti’s known poetry.

Crump gives the reader a remarkably comprehensive text with notes revealing Rossetti’s process of composition and revision and her painstaking concern for the technical details of her work. The variant readings in the notes are taken from extant manuscripts, individual poems as published or privately printed before being incorporated into her published collections, and all the English and American editions of her poems through William Michael Rossetti’s The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1904). A special feature of this variorum edition is its list of holographs and their locations.

In the first volume Crump brings together Rossetti’s two earliest published collections; in the second will be the individually published poems; and in the third, the unpublished poems.