Abstract
Monna Innominata is a sonnet sequence consisting of 14 sonnets, each one preceded by a double epigraph from Dante and Petrarch. Its daunting length has meant that individual sonnets have often garnered more critical attention than the sequence as a whole.1 Rossetti herself would have resisted this practice. Refusing an American editor permission to excerpt Monna Innominata, she explained: ‘Such compound work has a connection (very often) which is of interest to the author and which an editor gains nothing by discarding’.2 In the interest of reading in the spirit of Rossetti, this chapter addresses the sonnet sequence in its entirety. Although I do not, for reasons of space, include the whole text of Monna Innominata, it can be found on pages 86–93 in Volume 2 of the Crump edition.
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Notes
For more on this subject, see Marguerite Mills Chiarenza, The Divine Comedy: Tracing God’s Art (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989), p. 11.
S. T. Coleridge, ‘Lecture on Dante’, Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1936), p. 152.
Steve Ellis, Dante and English Poetry: Shelley to T. S. Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 107.
DGR, ‘Dante At Verona’, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Collected Writings, ed. Jan Marsh. (London: J. M. Dent, 1999), ll. 415–20.
CGR, “Dante: The Poet Illustrated Out of the Poem”, The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine 27, (February 1884) 572.
CGR, “Dante, An English Classic”, Churchman’s Shilling Magazine and Family Treasury 2, (1867) 200.
Francis Hueffer, The Troubadours (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), p. 272.
Lord Byron, ‘Don Juan’, (1821) The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), canto 3:8.
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© 2007 Dinah Roe
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Roe, D. (2007). ‘Great Love and Long Study’: Dante, Petrarch, and Monna Innominata. In: Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625204_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230625204_4
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