Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style (review)

Constance W. Hassett has written a first-rate book on Christina Rossetti that treats her not as a woman poet, nor a religious poet, nor even a Pre-Raphaelite poet—though Hassett remains alert to the implications of all these contexts; instead, Hassett discusses Rossetti as, fundamentally, a poet, an artist whose medium is the word and whose style is characterized by "patience." This approach leads the author both to insightful analyses of the influence of other poets on Rossetti's work, and to exciting and illuminating close readings of Rossetti poems both familiar and unfamiliar.

Hassett's discussions of unfamiliar works provide the pleasure of rediscovering Rossetti's artistry in little-regarded poems, even as she offers original insights into poems critics discuss most often. Her nuanced reading of "Goblin Market" (1862) provides a good example of such an approach. Hassett focuses (patiently) on style, examining how narrative and lyric strands of the poem intertwine to complicate its treatment of "questions of desire" (15). Through careful attention to the sounds, textures, connotations, and histories of the words Rossetti uses to weave her poem, as well as to the effects she achieves through meter, Hassett offers us a fresh, non-reductive perspective on this often-treated work. Occasionally, a reading that depends on obscure word derivations may strike the reader as fanciful, but even these points are suggestive. Hassett also moves beyond discussion of the single poem to demonstrate how similar issues of reticence and volubility appear in other Rossetti poems, so that the poet's works become mutually illuminating. As part of the "Goblin Market" chapter, for instance, she includes a reading of "Up-Hill" (1862) that simultaneously opens up the apparently simple allegory by focusing on its treatment of "reticence that masquerades as its opposite" (57) and enhances our understanding of the longer poem's uses of silence.

This aesthetic approach to Rossetti's poetry provides fascinating local insights, but it is most valuable and original in the way it reveals the unity of Rossetti's work, early and late, bringing together the playfully oblique "Winter: My Secret" (1862) with the haunting absences of "Remember" (1862); the lyrical nonsense of Sing-Song (1872) with the high seriousness of the late religious verse. Brilliant chapters on Sing-Song and Verses (1893) establish their continuities with and significance within the rest of the Rossetti canon, as well as their artistic merits—though Hassett also demonstrates specific ways in which some of Rossetti's late religious verse no longer seems to have the "patience" for details of "style," sacrificing an "enlivening aesthetic tension" (204) in favor of a preordained ending. But in her discussion of how poems from devotional volumes published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge are transformed when released from their original prose contexts, Hassett provides convincing evidence of Rossetti's continued commitment to aesthetic value and the possibilities of form in her later work.

In addition to contextualized close readings of Rossetti's poems, Hassett offers fascinating analyses of Rossetti's relationships with other poets and poetic styles. She reads Monna Innominata (1881) through its interrelations not just with the obvious precursors by Dante and Petrarch but also with the other major nineteenth-century sonnet sequences by D. G. Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, enhancing understanding of how Rossetti transforms the genre. Hassett also reads Rossetti's second sonnet sequence Later Life (1881) in relation to her brother's House of Life (1881), but her discussion of Later Life understates its unity and underlying psychological chronology, treating it as a collection of lyrics rather than a true sequence. Nevertheless, she provides a suggestive account of its relation to Monna Innominata and illuminating readings of several sonnets.

Hassett's discussion of the influence of Felicia Hemans and Letitia Landon (L. E. L.) also offers important insights, particularly in readings of "L. E. L." (1866) and "The Lowest Room" (1875), and she argues convincingly that L. E. L. had the...