Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints by Elizabeth Ludlow (review)

Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints. By Elizabeth Ludlow. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. ISBN 978-1-4725-1232-1. Pp. vi + 261. $ 104.00 In this monograph, Elizabeth Ludlow corrects some long-standing oversimplifications of Christina Rossetti’s reading, writing, and publishing methods, while extending, deepening, and complicating other recent inquiries into the poet’s theological perspectives as expressed through her lengthy career. Painstakingly tracing and chronologically reconstructing the composition, publication, and reception histories of Rossetti’s oeuvre from 1847 to 1893, Ludlow successfully illustrates the poet’s attentiveness to diverse audiences, reinstates her importance as an English poet/theologian in the tradition of George Herbert, connects her to later theologians like Simone Weil and Karl Barth, and suggests that her work can be best understood through intratextuality and through a diachronic, not synchronic, view of time. As a whole, the book asserts that Rossetti exhorts herself and her readers to consider their earthly journeys as a form of ‘‘waiting with the saints.’’ Chapter 1, ‘‘Attuned to the Voices of the Saints: Rossetti’s Devotional Heritage,’’ illustrates how Rossetti modeled her devotional poetry upon the Psalms, as well as ancient, 17th-century, and Victorian church tradition in order to create a ‘‘hermeneutic of piety’’ (16). Especially engaging is her extension of previous critical understandings of Rossetti’s study of Augustine’s Confessions and her delineation of Rossetti’s intellectual understanding of the doctrine of the Real Presence, as it was being debated by Victorian divines such as Pusey and Keble. Through an examination of Rossetti’s intellectual, literary, and religious practices, Ludlow achieves an in-depth discussion of Rossetti’s ‘‘After Communion,’’ as it was written, published, and republished in different contexts for different audiences . In the context of the entire chapter, Ludlow asserts that Rossetti cultivated a readership that understood the historic and modern role of poetry in Christian devotional reading and welcomed it as a personal practice. In her second chapter, ‘‘Grace, Revelation, and Wisdom: Early Poetry Including Goblin Market and Other Poems,’’ Ludlow identifies and explores connections between Rossetti’s compositions of the 1840s and 1850s and her devotional reading at the time in the books of Proverbs, Song of Solomon, and Ecclesiastes, as well as the work of Julian of Norwich, John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and minor church Father Gregory of Nyssa (who had been referenced in Tractarian literature with which Rossetti was familiar). Focusing on ‘‘the role of contemplation in the transformation of the self’’ (59), Ludlow traces a growth in Rossetti’s attitude toward desire away from one of disdain with the physical world toward one which reorients desire into a productive space of waiting. Considering Rossetti as the only female contributor to the Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, Ludlow’s second chapter also reexamines three poems Rossetti published in the second issue —‘‘A Pause,’’ ‘‘Song’’, and ‘‘A Testimony’’—freeing them from William Michael Rossetti’s secularizing commentary (a practice that is frequently repeated in the book, as Ludlow considers both the timing and Book Reviews 391 motives of his statements which have influenced much of the criticism of his sister’s work until recent decades) and reinstating it in the context of Christina Rossetti’s own reading at the time of composition. She then moves on to perform an intratextual analysis of how ‘‘From House to Home,’’ ‘‘The Convent Threshold,’’ and ‘‘Goblin Market,’’ which were all written between summer 1858 and autumn 1859 and all published in the same volume, ‘‘exemplify how the extremities of desire find release and fulfillment in the anticipation of redemption, rather than in escapist contemplations on the refuge of death’’ (90). Moving on to examine Rossetti’s poetry of the 1860s and early 1870s, Ludlow explores how it develops a ‘‘Theology of Purpose’’ (97) by ‘‘blur[ring] temporal bounds’’ between medieval and Victorian female Christian experience in chapter 3. Arguing that Rossetti uses the doctrine of theosis (a transformative union with God achieved by both human and divine efforts) to insert a unique voice into the increasing market for devotional aids of her time, the chapter examines how a pair of narrative poems written in the...