Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination: The Devotional Poetry and Prose (review)

Scholars, critics, and fans of Christina Rossetti know that her poetic imagination and her religious faith are inextricably intertwined, but sustained close readings that show how Rossetti creatively appropriated Tractarian religious ideology and illuminate her dexterity as a serious religious artist writing poetry have been surprisingly rare. In Christina Rossetti's Faithful Imagination, Dinah Roe builds on work begun by G. B. Tennyson, Diane D'Amico, David A. Kent, Antony Harrison, Mary Arseneau, and others to articulate how Rossetti's religious faith, based on High Church theology, was both inspiration and muse. With critical sensitivity and careful attentiveness to Rossetti's poetic style and scriptural heritage, Roe demonstrates in convincing and original close readings Rossetti's deft mining of Tractarian aesthetic resources including typology, analogy, and reserve. Roe gracefully interweaves her readings with scripture, forging detailed and concrete connections between the Bible and Rossetti's poetry and prose.

For example, in her chapter on the influences of the Tractarian poet-priests John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Isaac Williams, Roe uses Rossetti's poem "Consider the Lilies of the Field" (1853) as her organizing principle. Claiming that the poem itself enacts Tractarian reserve, or "faith in secrecy" (19), Roe shows how Rossetti explores the relationship between nature and divinity and how Rossetti's analogical "double mode of perception" actually works. Roe plumbs the rich depths of Rossetti's seemingly simple poem by observing thematic connections between "Consider the Lilies" and devotional prose from Rossetti's Time Flies (1885) and The Face of the Deep (1892), prose excerpts from Williams, and typological relationships between Solomon and Christ; she also traces Rossetti's movement from the Psalms, Isaiah, and Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament to Matthew and Luke in the New. She observes how Rossetti's emphases change when she revisits the theme ten years later in another poem, "Consider" (1863). Roe's close scrutiny of Rossetti's poetic movement demonstrates the poet's complex theological maneuvers and alerts us to the richness and nuances of Rossetti's poetic reimagining.

Instead of setting up Rossetti's faith in opposition to artistic aspiration, as other critics have done, the chapter "Rossetti, St. Paul, and Women" shows how her religious imagination helped her explore various avenues and identities, especially for women (98). In this chapter, Roe discusses Rossetti's engagement with female suffrage (which challenged Pauline injunctions), and she examines presentations of Old Testament women in relation to Rossetti's meditations on these subjects from her devotional work. Roe is careful to note Rossetti's struggles with the social, religious, and political issues brought out by the question of female suffrage (though her letters to Augusta Webster showed ambivalence, Rossetti finally signed the anti-suffrage petition in 1888), while still doing justice to Rossetti's theological conviction that the sexes are spiritually equal (115). Ultimately faith, not gender, determines everyone's "place" in heaven (126).

The strengths of Roe's analyses lie in her comprehensive understanding of Biblical texts in relation to Rossetti's religious work, her ability to uncover worlds of complexity beneath Rossetti's simple surfaces, and her own disciplined imagination when she frames Rossetti's imaginative turns within their Victorian historical and religious contexts. In an illuminating chapter on Time Flies, Roe depicts the poet grappling with issues of faith faced by the devotional artist—the reconciliation of individual spiritual responsibility with responsibility to one's community and work (131), the paradox of desiring spiritual humility and creating authoritative religious commentary, and the writer's role in relation to her audience and her God. In sustained and lucid commentary, Roe fleshes out Rossetti's complicated use of typology—a use that her Victorian audience would have understood but that twenty-first-century readers have often found elusive and opaque. Additionally, Roe's analysis of Rossetti's word play, linguistic experiments, and yoking of style and sense ("ultimately time . . . [becomes] in the final pared-down sentence...