Volume 42, Number 17 · November 2, 1995
Governess on Speed
By Fiona MacCarthy
Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life
by Jan Marsh
Viking, 634 pp., $29.95
Christina Rossetti wrote poems of peculiar frozen feeling. This is one of the reasons for her long neglect after her death in 1894, an unpopularity out of all proportion to the neglect of Victorian poetry in general. Even children singing her Christmas carol 'In the bleak mid-winter' recognize that this is a grimly melancholy version of Christmas: 'Earth stood hard as iron,/ Water like a stone.' Rossetti's dreary images are those of sudden arrested optimism: fountains sealed, hope deferred, hearts shriveled up to nothing, 'hard and cold and small, of all hearts the worst of all.' A member of the family, perhaps her poet brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, called these intense laments 'the groans' and Christina's particular quality of groaniness arose from an extremity of female experience. There are parallels, of course, with Brontë and Dickinson but even more, I think, with Anne Sexton and with Plath in her fascinated instinct for self-annihilation. Rossetti wrote her own Lazarus poem in 1890, when she was sixty years old:
Review, 4114 words
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