Sufferings of a Born Poet
KNOX, MELISSA
Sufferings of a Born Poet Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life By Jan Marsh Viking. 634pp. $29.95. Reviewed by Melissa Knox Assistant Professor of English, St. Peters College; author, "Oscar...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...After she died, Christina Rossetti achieved the literary fame she yearned for, but her work grew less popular after the turn of the century...
...d. Free Distribution by Mail...
...Extent and nature of circulation, a. Total no copies (Net Press Run): Average no...
...10,800...
...This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the December 4, 1995 issue of this publication...
...New York, New York I 10001...
...Her masterpiece, "Goblin Market," according to Marsh, grew directly out of that experience...
...New York 10001.9...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 1.280...
...Actual no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date...
...Christina seems to have been living proof, too, of Oscar Wilde's remark that "hearts are made to be broken...
...The big crocodile, "with luscious fat distilled upon his chin," weeps and wrings his hands...
...copies of single issue published nearest to Filing date, 140...
...Marsh's is the first full-length study I know of that penetrates psychoanalytical-ly some probable causes of Christina's malaise, and the creative use she made of it...
...Woolf, praising Christina Rossetti as a "born poet," added, "if I were bringing a case against God she is one of the first witnesses I should call...
...260 Actual no...
...Born in 1830, the same year as Emily Dickinson, Rossetti is often remembered in similar ways...
...The author goes on to comment that the crocodile may in addition be Christina's "bad self"—the part of her she blames for whatever transpired with her father...
...Marsh writes: "In part this imperious figure seems to represent the dominance of all males, but he also brings to mind the role played by Papa in his last years, weeping as he extracted the sacrifice of other family members...
...Dante Gabriel, in reporting this to his friend and fellow PRB founder Holman Hunt, captured the essence of Christina: "When I proposed that my sister should join, I never meant that she should attend the meetings, to which I know it would be impossible to persuade her...
...Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate as a voluntary social worker supervising young prostitutes who wanted to be reformed...
...Do not leave blank...
...Street Vendors and Counter Sales (Not Mailed): Average no...
...He was the greatest literary influence on his sister, but Christina, Marsh tells us, "declined to join" the PRB and its campaign to develop a new authenticity in painting and writing...
...Actual no...
...Milchel Levitas...
...New York...
...copies of single issue published nearest lo filing date...
...Christina was the youngest of four siblings, all of whom displayed precocious talent...
...William said her pain was exacerbated by fears of hell...
...Actual no...
...Poet, painter, and founding member of the secretive and subversive Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB), Dante Gabriel has often been regarded as the brightest star in the Rossetti galaxy...
...Her symptoms eventually subsided, but she suffered occasional relapses, and her altered looks made her ever more reclusive...
...New York, New York 10001...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 10.095...
...11.750...
...2) Return from News Agents: Average no copies cash issue during preceding 12 months...
...Complimentary, and Other Free): Average no copies each issue dunng preceding 12 months...
...The luscious fat on his chin is like the dribbling of an invalid, while the winged vessel has a distinctly maternal character, restoring order and silently rebuking the beast...
...If owned by a partnership or other unincorporated firm, its names and address, as well as that of each individual, must be given...
...10,750 b. Paid and/or Requested Circulation: 1. Sales Through Dealers and Carriers...
...I certify thai all information furnished on this form is true and complete...
...New York 10001: Shelley Applet on...
...A neighbor complained of "long-continued fits of hysterical screaming," Marsh reports...
...Her family, full of historic figures, is here also...
...Full name: American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc., 275 Seventh Avenue, New York...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 mcrahs, 705...
...Her father, Gabriele Rossetti, was a poet, scholar and political exile who fled the kingdom of Naples with a price on his head, eventually arriving in England, where he taught Italian and wrote a lengthy commentary on Dante...
...If the publication is published by a nonprofit organization, its name and address must be stated...
...New York 10001...
...and for a present gave Christina a sea mouse preserved in spirits...
...S. Complete mailing address of headquarters or general business of- \ lice of publisher (not printer): 275 Seventh Avenue...
...President, 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10001...
...465- e. Free Distribution Outside the Mail (Carriers or Other Means}: Average no...
...125 t.Total Free Distribution (Sum of I5d and !5e...
...Actual no...
...it is certainly the most complete, however...
...3685...
...275 Seventh Avenue...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...i. Title of Publication: The New Leader 2. Publication No...
...Marsh notes that around this time Christina copied into her mother's commonplace book quotations from Wordsworth dealing with sexual transgressions...
...Intriguingly, Christina developed an interest in salvaging fallen women...
...The four Rossetti children, as one observer has noted, "shared out aspects of their father's career"—William by doubling as a critic and scholar, Maria by becoming a teacher, Christina apoet, and Dante Gabriel a "cultural leader and hero...
...In 1859, she began to serve at the St...
...If not owned by a corporation, the names and addresses of the individual owners must be given...
...8,540...
...Scrupulously documented, highly informative, original in many interpretations, it will prove indispensable to anyone interested in 19th-cen-tury women...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing dale...
...She was the image of solitude and morbid piety, always dressed in black, but possessed of wit and a mordant critical sensibility...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...Both women were shy and reclusive, preoccupied with unrequited love, deferred hopes and hidden sorrow...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 590...
...copies of single issue published nearest to Filing date, 10.370...
...New York...
...In attempting to restore the eminence Rossetti felt compelled to sacrifice, Marsh examines every aspect of her sensibility and existence—from her nursery days, to her being denied the Poet Laureate's post in 1892, to her last painful weeks and death from breast cancer in 1894...
...Christina herself had a mental breakdown when she was about 15, and was apparently given to self-mutilation: While comforting a niece sobbing after throwing a tantrum the poet told her:" I, too, had a very passionate temper...
...Samples...
...130 Actual no...
...William, a civil servant, became the family chronicler...
...Average no...
...11.750...
...Publication Name: The New Leader...
...Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: September 1i-25, 1995...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...g. Total Distribution (Sum of 15c and 15f) Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months...
...c Total Paid anoVor Requested Cucula-tion (Sum of 15b( i) and ISN2)): Average no...
...Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher, editor, and managing editor: Publisher American Labor Conference on International Affairs, Inc., 275 Seventh Avenue, New York, New York 10001...
...but [I] must give up the idea, as I find she objects to this also, under the impression that it would seem like display, I believe—a sort of thing she abhors...
...Actual tin...
...Owner (If owned by a corporation, its name and address must be stated and also immediately thereafter the names and addresses of stockholders owning or holding i per cent or more of total amount of stock...
...4. Frequency of issue: Biweekly except monthly January through October, and no issues in April, August and November...
...Management and Circulation (Required by 39 1 U.S.C...
...This heartfelt declaration sums up the frustration of many readers when they discover the self-deprivations and religious scruples that frequently robbed Rossetti of life's fulfillments, and ultimately stifled her strongest poetic instincts...
...Although interest flared briefly in 1930, the centenary of her birth, it took another 25 years before her writing began to be seriously studied...
...Actual no...
...The cancer that killed her caused great agony...
...240 i. Total (sum of 15g...
...Percent Paid and/or Requested Circulation (I5c']5g x 100): Average no...
...Her next and last romantic involvement, with Charles Cayley, fared no better...
...In it, crocodiles crawl out of the Euphrates, and one of them gorges himself on all the others until a winged vessel comes as "an avenging ghost...
...00286044.3...
...1995...
...2. Paid or Requested Mail Subscriptions (Include Advertisers' Proof Copies/Exchange Copies): Average no copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 8,815...
...Secretary...
...Her mother, Frances Polidori, 17 years younger than her father, was English-born but half Italian, and had a brother who achieved fame as Byron's physician and as the author of a Gothic tale, The Vampyre...
...As Woolf puts it, "she starved into austere emaciation a very fine original gift...
...Spoiled: Average no...
...Known bondholders, mortgagees and other security holders owning or holding I per cent or more of total amount of bonds, mortgages or other securities: None...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 94...
...translated the gospel into Iroquois...
...The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for Federal income lax purposes has not changed during preceding 12 months...
...5. Number of issues published annually: 13 6. Annual subscription price: $34.00...
...For completion by nonprofit organizations authorized to mail at special rates...
...7. Complete mailing address of known office ' of publication (not printer): 275 Seventh Avenue...
...of single issue published nearest to Filing date...
...Statement of Ownership...
...When the painter James Collinson, to whom she was engaged, went back to the Roman Catholicism he had abandoned for her, Christina's stern sense of duty dictated the end of their relationship...
...for whatever reason, Christina seems to have been frightened by aggressive masculinity...
...Actual no...
...Barbara Shapiro...
...15h[l)and I5h|2|): Average no...
...Actual no...
...copies of single issue published nearest to Filing date, 9.780...
...In 1871, Christina contracted Graves' disease, a thyroid condition that causes unpleasant physical and psychological problems, including mood changes and erratic ill-temper...
...Editor Myron I Kolatch, 275 Seventh Avenue...
...Christina's hair fell out, her skin discolored, and her eyes bulged...
...Actual no...
...Her isolation increased with the deaths of one brother (Dante Gabriel), her sister and her mother...
...It presents the dangers of carnal temptation through an allegory of two sisters preyed upon by "wicked goblin men...
...h. Copies Not Distributed (1) Office Use, Leftovers...
...Its undercurrents, though, reflect the influence of Christina's devout older sister Maria—and, as Ellen Moers has written, incorporate representations of infantile sexuality...
...My Dream," a poem written when she was 25, seems to corroborate the speculation about Christina's father...
...Her love life foundered in the shoals of her fierce Anglican faith...
...She and her brother Gabriel, later called Dante Gabriel, were known as the "two storms," while her sister Maria and her brother William Michael were the "two calms...
...Pale because frequently ill and unhappy, she joked that even the leeches she was treated with "made for the door whenever faced with her flesh...
...Managing Editor None...
...A well-known painting by her brother, Dante Gabriel, EcceAn-cilla Domini, or The Annunciation, done the year the engagement to Collinson ended, shows an almost anorectic Christina modeling as the Virgin Mary in a white robe, shrinking back from the Angel Gabriel like a disturbed 13-year-old on her first trip to the gynecologist...
...On one occasion, being rebuked by my dear Mother for some fault, I seized upon a pair of scissors, and ripped up my arm to vent my wrath...
...This poem inspired works as diverse as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures Underground and Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballads...
...Date of Filing: September 29...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date, 1,240...
...According to Virginia Woolf, he "shuffled about the world in a state of absent-minded dishabille...
...copies of single issue published nearest to filing date...
...Maria wrote a textbook on teaching Italian, and became an Anglican nun following a romantic disappointment...
...Marsh's biography may not be the best written (I prefer Kathleen Jones' Learning Not to Be First...
...Business Manager...
...copies each issue during preceding 12 months, 93.SV Actual no...
...author, "Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide " Christina Rossetti's melancholy lyrics made her a major figure among minor Victorian poets...
...Jan Marsh, in this new biography, observes that "just as with James, Charles' unworldliness and lack of sexual presence may have been his most appealing features...
...Scrutinizing recurrent nightmarish dream visions in her work, the biographer concludes that she may have been sexually molested in early adolescence by her father, who experienced a severe mental illness andrequired constant care from his wife and daughters...
...I merely intended that she should entrust her productions to my reading...
...So, to a degree, did her persona...
...copies of single issue published nearest to Filing date, 10,750...
Vol. 78 • December 1995 • No. 9
