Christina Rossetti

More than one critic has compared the English poet Christina Rossetti to Dorothea Brooke, the heroine of George Eliot’s Middlemarch. (A character, by the way, that I have always longed to kick in the kneecap.) Like Dorothea, Ms. Rossetti seems to have gotten a tremendous amount of satisfaction from denying herself things. She gave up chess because she found that she enjoyed winning; she covered up the racier sections of her favorite books; she refused proposals from two men that she was interested in when they failed to live up to her extremely strict religious convictions. Like Mary Shelley, one wonders if Miss Rossetti would have been a very different woman had she lived in an era with more advanced psychiatric care, but there is no denying her tremendous gifts as a poet. Rossetti’s poems--particularly A Birthday and Goblin Market--are masterpieces of Victorian poetry, full of lush, kinky, detailed imagery.

Aftertaste:
None.

Availability:
Everywhere.

Other Recommendations:
Possession, by A.S. Byatt

Anything by Emily or Charlotte Bronte