The Pre-Raphaelites

Christina and Dante Rossetti, William Morris, and his friend Edward Burne-Jones were well represented in this year’s offerings.

The Rossettis

In Christina Rossetti: A Descriptive Bibliography (Oak Knoll Press), Martha Ives has prepared a remarkably broad palette of information about Rossetti’s revisions, adaptations, and publication history. In accordance with bibliographic principles set forth by Fredson Bowers and G. Thomas Tanselle in Principles of Bibliographical Description, Ives offers a list of musical settings of Rossetti’s works; a catalogue of her poems and articles; a partial bibliography of later editions and reproductions; an overview of her efforts to cooperate with publishers; a bibliography of her translations and printed ephemera; and a study of her many afterthoughts and revisions in the margins of her published works. The result of this work is a trove which students of Rossetti will explore for years to come.

In “Laura’s Laurels: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Monna Innominata’ 1 and 8 and Petrarch’s Rime sparse 85 and 1” (VP 49, no. 4), Mary Moore sets aside Rossetti’s indebtedness to Dante to consider the ways in which she reversed Petrarchan tropes and prototypes. In careful analyses of the opening sonnet and sonnet eight, in which Esther’s seduction of King Ahasuerus inspires the poet’s desire “to take my life so into my hand,” Moore suggests that the prevalence of aural imagery in Rossetti’s sequence reflected a view of the “field of vision” as an “arena of female objectification” (p. 505), and that her use of elision, replacement, and appropriation confronted “the ideology of gender implicit in Petrarch’s poems.”

In “Home one and all”: Redeeming the Whore of Babylon in Christina Rossetti’s Religious Poetry” (VP 49, no. 1), Stephanie Johnson argues persuasively that Rossetti’s assertion in “The Holy City, New Jerusalem” that God will bring both “strangers. . . . [h]ome . . . one and all,” as well as her use of imagery applied to the “Whore of Babylon” in Revelations to describe the consort of Christ in “She Shall Be Brought Unto the King” (1898), were expressions of her evolving conviction that all may be redeemed.

In “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Inner Standing-Point’ and ‘Jenny’ Reconstrued” (Univ. of Toronto Quarterly 80, no. 3), D. M. R. Bentley argues that Rossetti’s use of the “inner standing point” of a “young and thoughtful man of the world” who visits the room of a prostitute “invites the reader of the poem . . . to enter into rather than merely observe the situation . . . and . . . participate in [its] perspectives and emotions”; and that the responses in the poem’s conclusion—in which the speaker leaves coins in Jenny’s hair and departs on a “dark path I can strive to clear”—are “far more complex, intricate, nuanced, and engaged than they were when he began the poem, and surely this was also Rossetti’s hope for the poem’s readers” (p. 713). Bentley’s analysis of Rossetti’s intentions is persuasive, but it does not respond to the familiar feminist criticism that Jenny herself—unlike the speaker in Augusta Webster’s contemporary “A Castaway”—remains mute throughout the poem.

In “‘A Very Clear and Finished Piece of Writing’: William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Mrs. Holmes Grey’” (Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 20, N.S., Spring), Bentley reexamines William Rossetti’s 840-line dramatic monologue, originally drafted for the short-lived Germ in 1850 and finally published in The Broadway in 1868. Bentley makes a persuasive case that this neglected work of Rossetti’s youth was a pioneering effort to bring a realistic tale of middle-class grief and jealousy into the range of poetic expression, and that the poem has an impartially “reportorial and forensic quality which . . . connects it to Pre-Raphaelitism and [gives it] an almost modernist coolness and impersonality” (p. 20).

In “Visible Sound and Auditory Scenes: Word, Image, and Music in Tennyson, D. G. Rossetti, and Morris” (Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley [Ashgate]), Linda K. Hughes canvasses mid-Victorian views of music, which ranged from Ruskin’s insistence that music be subordinate to language, to Pater...