Christina Rossetti - Frances Thomas

Who was Christina Rossetti? And why is she so invisible today? These are the questions that Frances Thomas addresses in this biography.;Probably the major woman poet of Victorian Britain, she is overshadowed by her colourful brother, Dante Gabriel; though most people have read "Goblin Market" and "My Heart is Like a Singing Bird" and have sung "In the Deep Midwinter".;A study of many previously untapped sources has enabled the author to piece together a more complete picture of this enigmatic woman. Wherever possible, she has drawn on Christina Rossetti's own writings and the impressions of her contemporaries to describe a personality that might have been crippled and destroyed by her own passionate and contradictory nature, yet who utilized the contradictions to write subtle and profound poems, many of them still unknown to the general reader.;An extraordinary happy and creative childhood, later to be blighted by illness and poverty; the overwhelming influence of an uncompromising High Church devotion; and several unhappy love affairs all played their part in forming Christina Rossetti's poetry. Though superficially very different, she and her more flamboyant brother were at heart more similar than might be imagined. They shared a sense of humour; and wit and playfulness are often bursting through the sombre surfaces of her work.;Christina Rossetti's lifelong devotion to poetry, and the scope and breadth of that poetry shine through in this probing work, the story of what her other brother, the loyal William, described as her "hushed life-drama".