Christina Rossetti Letters

BOOK REVIEWS Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting For fear of little men; Wee folk, good folk, Trooping all together; Green jacket, red cap, And white owl's feather! It is well known that Swinburne admired Christina Rossetti's poetry (he dubbed her "the Jael who led their [the Pre-Raphaelites'] host to victory "); but when we read selections from both within a single section, we recognize the metrical debt that he owed to her. And so on. I believe it is important to take the work one reviews on its own terms, not to criticize it for failing to be the book the reviewer would have written . Still, when dealing with an anthology with such a wealth of material to choose from, it is impossible not to wonder about some of the choices—in my case, about some of the omissions. Hares-Stryker may have missed an opportunity to flesh out her project more fully by failing to include more correspondence among the principals—among the Rossetti family, for example, particularly some of the discussions about composition between Gabriel and Christina. She might have offered in her introduction more reference to the religious context of the time and examples of those religious poets who influenced some of the PreRaphaelites . But this is to quibble. An Anthology of Pre-Raphaelite Writers is a fine idea finely executed; while it contains nothing new in its individual parts, in the sum of its parts it offers a unique reconstitution of the PreRaphaelite circle. Katherine ). Mayberry ________________Rochester Institute of Technology Christina Rossetti Letters The Letters of Christina Rossetti. Volume 1,1843-1873. Antony H. Harrison , ed. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997. lxii + 547 pp. $110 THE FIRST of a multi-volumed edition of the complete collected letters of Christina Rossetti, this work responds to current attention to Christina Rossetti who, with other such female poets of her period as Elizabeth Barret Browning, Jean Ingelow, and Dora Greenwell, are regaining both attention and respect, a change due in great part to feminist criticism and theory. Such feminist theory that seeks to find the 463 ELT 41 : 4 1998 woman's suppressed voice, as well as sublimated (or subverted) anger and violence, finds in Christina Rossetti a rich subject. She herself deliberately , and it seems diligently, repressed instincts of "the whole self," not for the sake of her society's precepts regarding women but for the sake of her own religious convictions. In a letter not contained in this first volume, for example, Rossetti refers to the Bible as the source for her own avoidance of issues involved in The Woman Question: My objection seems to myself a fundamental one underlying the whole structure of female claims. Does it not appear as if the Bible was based upon an understood unalterable distinction between men and women, their position, duties, privileges? Not arrogating to myself but most earnestly desiring to attain to the character of a humble orthodox Xtian, so it does appear to me; not merely under the Old but also under the New Dispensation. The fact of the Priesthood being exclusively man's, leaves me in no doubt that the highest functions are not in this world open to both sexes: and if not all then a selection must be made and a line drawn somewhere___I do not think the present social movements tend on the whole to uphold Xtianity, or that the influence of some of our most prominent and gifted women is exerted in that direction: and thus thinking I cannot aim at "women's rights." Critics from other schools as well as Victorianists and general readers alike, however, will also find much of interest in these letters written by a woman who both influenced and was respected by such authors as Swinburne, Hopkins, Ford, and Woolf. In his introduction, Harrison writes that "Major critics ... have begun to suggest how studies of Rossetti 's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers." And this volume offers us letters residing...