Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) is remembered as one of the Pre-Raphaelites – a group of 19th century artists and writers who took inspiration from works of art produced in the Middle Ages. Her brother, the painter Dante Gabriel, was one of the most prominent of this group.

Christina, one of the most important women poets writing in nineteenth-century England, was born in London December 5, 1830, to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. She was of a religious temperament, in common with many other writers of the period. Judging from sketches made by her brother Dante, Christina as a teenager seems to have been attractive, though we can’t tell the extent to which he flattered her. In 1848 she became engaged to James Collinson, one of the minor Pre-Raphaelite brethren, but the engagement ended after he converted to Roman Catholicism.

When her father’s failing health and eyesight forced him into retirement in 1853, Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, but had to give it up after a year or so. Thereafter she led a very retiring life, interrupted by a recurring illness which was sometimes diagnosed as angina and sometimes tuberculosis. From the early 1860s on she was said to have been in love with Charles Cayley, but, according to her other brother William, refused to marry him because “she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian.” Milk-and-water Anglicanism was not to her taste.

Christina, her mother and her sister Maria were devout members of the evangelical branch of the Church of England. Maria eventually became an Anglican nun. Christina’s religious scruples are reminiscent of Dorothea Brooke’s in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, whose ascetic nature led her to deny herself the pleasure of horse-riding. Similarly, Christina gave up chess because she found she enjoyed winning. She also objected to nudity in painting, especially if the artist was a woman, and refused to go see Wagner’s Parsifal, because it celebrated a pagan mythology. Christina was very much a Victorian woman, with impulses and values we find strange and foreign in the 21st Century.

After rejecting Charles Cayley’s offer of marriage in 1866, Christina (like many Victorian spinsters) lived vicariously through the lives of other people. Although she confined herself largely to staying at home, her social life must have been fascinating and stimulating, with a circle that included her brothers' friends, Whistler, Swinburne, F.M. Brown, and Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). She continued to write and in the 1870s to work for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. She was troubled physically by neuralgia and emotionally by Dante’s breakdown in 1872. The last 12 years of her life, after his death in 1882, were quiet ones. She died of cancer December 29, 1894