Selected by Chris Emery and published to coincide with National Poetry Month, April 2009. This selection contains her best known poems and includes some fine examples from her devotional writing. Rossetti was plagued by illness and depression, yet by the time of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s death in 1861, she was hailed as the next ‘female laureate’, and viewed as a natural successor. Many see elements of early feminism in her work Rossetti worked as a volunteer at a women’s refuge for former prostitutes. Her most famous poem, ‘Goblin Market’, is at first reading is a tale of two sisters and their misadventures with goblins, yet the work is multi-faceted, sexual and complex. Front cover image for Goblin market and other. Rossetti’s imagination is profoundly religious and Christian themes dominate her writing. Authors: Christina Georgina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Illustrator). However, by the 1970s Rossetti was rescued from obscurity and her poetry gained in popularity. When Goblin Market was released in April 1859, most Victorians weren't able to purchase fresh fruit, a historical note of importance when reading the poem for Victorian agriculture and tone.Christina Rossetti’s poetry was largely ignored in the early part of the twentieth century, during the Modernist movement’s backlash against much Victorian writing.

Other critics focus not on gender but on the Victorian consciousness of a capitalist critique of the growing Victorian economic market, whether in relation to sisters' Lizzie and Laura's interaction with the market as gendered beings, the agricultural market, or in the rapid increase in advertising the 'Market'. Some critics suggest that the fantastical poem is about feminine sexuality and its relation to Victorian social mores, while many others view it as an overt expression of Rossetti's feminist and homosexual politics. The story of two sisters tempted with fruit by goblin merchants, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has inspired disparate interpretations.

Octavo, original cloth, with two designs by Dante Gabriel Rosetti. Second edition of the book that launched Christina Rosetti’s literary career and is believed to have inspired Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Like Emily Dickinson, she lived in self-imposed isolation, writing of God and lost love with a sensuality and.

London and Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., 1865. An important and often-quoted literary figure, the English poet Christina Rossetti (18301894) wrote some of the most beautiful and voluptuous poetry in the English language.

Goblin market and other poems