WE FOUND HER HIDDEN: The Remarkable Poetry of Christina Rossetti

This study examines thematic elements in Christina Rossetti’s poetry in order to celebrate and explain an important, undervalued writer and her remarkable artistic quest to achieve an original voice. Critics rightly applaud Rossetti’s metrical craftsmanship and songlike lyrical phrasings, but over-attention to formal felicities can impede proper interpretation of content. Through detailed readings of selected poems, this book demonstrates that Rossetti’s rigorously controlled use of language and innovative symbolism combine to create radical, ‘hidden’ intertextual levels of meaning beyond those attainable via biographical decoding, making her a singular bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. From earliest ‘secular’ interactions with Romantic and Tractarian thought, through Goblin Market (1862) and The Prince’s Progress (1866), Rossetti’s verse resists straightforward interpretation by subtly interrogating and subverting the patriarchal traditions of writing that it simultaneously extends: love lyric, fairy tale, quest myth, and sonnet. Persuasively constructing a case for the inability of male-ordained poetics to cope with the expression of active female identity, Monna Innominata (1881) deconstructs lyric tradition, casting together mediaeval, renaissance, Romantic and Victorian ideologies. This groundbreaking sonnet cycle disturbs poetic conventions and forms the most concentrated, sustained demonstration of the struggle to articulate the female self to be found in Rossetti’s oeuvre, perhaps in literary history. The painful sense of irresolution and despair pervading Monna Innominata sheds important light upon Christina Rossetti’s exclusive production of devotional literature during her final years.