In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Victorian Poetry 38.3 (2000) 437-447



[Access article in PDF]

Guide to the Year's Work

The Pre-Raphaelites

Florence S. Boos


The year brought the first extended biography of Dante Gabriel Rossetti since 1949 and the first reprint of Rossetti's collected poems since 1911, as well as books and articles on Christina Rossetti and William Morris and a collection of studies of the enduring aesthetic influence of Pre-Raphaelitism in Canada.

Arnold, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Hardy, Hopkins, Meredith, Swinburne, Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti have all benefited from biographies in recent decades, and Ronnalie Howard, Joan Rees, David Riede, James Richardson, David Sonstroem, and I (among others) have published critical studies of D. G. Rossetti's work, but no new assessment of his life as well as his double oeuvre of pictura et poesis has appeared since Oswald Doughty's A Victorian Romantic: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1949). Doughty focused rather narrowly on Rossetti's unhappy marriage and construed several of his imaginative works as straightforward biographical projections, and serious students of Rossetti have tended to rely on his edition with John Wahl of Rossetti's letters, William E. Fredeman's account of his années de crise in Prelude to the Last Decade (1971), and William Michael Rossetti's volumes of family reminiscences and annotated editions of his brother's works (1886, 1904, and 1911).

It is not hyperbolic, therefore, to suggest that Jan Marsh's Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Painter and Poet may offer the best biographical and critical overview of its subject since the days of William Michael Rossetti, for her careful study draws on new sources of information to provide a nuanced assessment of DGR's private life and the literary and artistic sources and implications of his work.

The feminist sensibility and background knowledge of the Pre-Raphaelite art world Marsh developed in Jane and May Morris (1986), The Legend of Lizzie Siddal (1989), Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (1989), Christina Rossetti: A Writer's Life (1994), and Pre-Raphaelitism and Women Artists (1997) also guide her critical views. She retraces the etiology and aftereffects of the "Fleshly School"-controversy, for example, finds biographical allusions to Rossetti's relations with Lizzie Siddal and Fanny Cornforth in his lyrics, and discerns traces of Rossetti's relationship with Jane Morris in The House of Life's rhetoric of celebration and disguise. But she also examines the textual evolution of "The Bride's Prelude," "Sister Helen," and the 1870 Poems, identifies new influences and contexts for "The Woodspurge," "Dante at Verona," "The [End Page 437] Card-Dealer," "The Song of the Bower," and "Nuptial Sleep," and fully documents Rossetti's central role in Alexander Gilchrist's edition of The Poetical Works of Blake (which Gilchrist's wife Anne completed after his death).

Marsh also gives voice to some of the women who knew Rossetti (Barbara Leigh Smith, for example), analyzes his rather ambivalent reactions to contemporary racism and slavery as well as his father's revolutionary politics, and points repeated contrasts between the worlds of Rossetti's sisters and the Victorian male artists and literary figures with whom he associated. Some of the "intertextual" influences Marsh searches out were mutual: Rossetti's "The Woodspurge," for example, echoed specific passages from Modern Painters, and Ruskin later elaborated his "Rossettian" views of medieval art in the work's third volume. Rossetti strongly influenced the young William Morris, of course, but he also wrote "The Staff and Scrip" for The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in something very like Morris' early style, and began to paint "Cassandra" about the time Morris composed "Scenes from the Fall of Troy." Inevitably, some of Rossetti's reactions were indifferent or hostile: his rejection, for example, of several sonnets by Gerard Manley Hopkins for an anthology Hall Caine edited in 1880, missed "the true mettle of poems like 'Spring,' 'The Windhover' and 'God's Grandeur,' and perhaps the chance of lengthening their author's life through a smidgen of recognition" (p. 512).

Among Rossetti's later poems, Marsh values "Rose Mary" and "The White Ship," and her book's last lines are...

pdf