Christina Rossetti and the Romantics: Influence and Ideology

Abstract

Christina Rossetti was not a voracious, but rather a focused, reader. Apart from the Bible, Thomas à Kempis, St Augustine, Plato, Homer and the classics in Italian, her adult reading was largely in the religious literature of her day (W. Rossetti 1904, pp. lxix–lxx).¹ She appears uninfluenced by a number of authors and works we would expect her to have appropriated. References to Shakespeare and Milton are, for instance, extremely unusual in her writing, and in 1870 she acknowledged to a close friend that she was still ‘the rare Englishwoman not to have read the Holy Grail’² Yet her copy of Keble’s The Christian Year was dog-eared by the time of her death in 1894. She read widely in Tractarian literature, as this fact, her sonnet on Newman, and the theological content of her books of devotional prose make clear (Chapman 1970, pp. 170–97; Tennyson 1981, pp. 197–203; Cantalupo 1988; Schofield 1988).