Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti: a different vision of Victorian poetry
In this second paper, I have decided to deal with one of the most important couples in the Victorian period: Christina Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Both developed at the same time a great interest in literature and art, and, consequently, they tried to show their own experience and feelings by means of poetry. One of the reasons why I have selected this couple to be analysed is the interest in seeing a different treatment of various themes in both authors and antagonism established between the discrepancy of ideas due to their own condition as a man and woman. A poetry that presents a wide variety of topics related to this period, where a sense of social responsibility, a Christianity called into a question and changes in ideology define a Victorian England, characterized by a great expansion of wealth, power and culture (Victorianweb, 2006). But, it is important to point out the appearance of women in literature and their position on society and culture. The aim of this paper is to show two different points of view in a same period of time, beyond a woman and a man’s eyes, since a woman’s life was not at the same level as the man’s. One example which explains what I am referring to is the concept of “faithfulness”. Adultery is not the same conception in women than in men because it seems to be that a man does not have enough with his wife. It is reflecting as if he had to be unfaithful instinctively. On the contrary, this concept has negative connotations in woman. If she is able to be unfaithful any time, she will be considered as a poor prostitute with a lot of damaging conceptions.
To conclude this introduction, it is necessary to explain the organisation of this paper. Firstly, I will deal with a brief allusion to both biographies and the social context. Secondly, I will try to analyse the ideas and the most important themes treated in both works and later, I will establish similarities and differences between both poets and their poetic works.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT OF CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Christina Georgina Rossetti (her complete name) was born in London in 1830 to Gabriele and Frances (Polidori) Rossetti. She was the youngest member of a remarkable family of poets, artists, and critics, but her father was from whom inherited many of her artistic tendencies. From her mother, she inherited her fundamentally religious temperament and the education received at home (Victorian Web, 1988). In the 1840’s her family was stricken with severe financial difficulties due to the deterioration of her father’s physical and mental health. Christina and her mother attempted to support the family by starting a day school, which, after a year or so, she had to give up (Victorian Web, 1988). When she was 14, Rossetti suffered a nervous breakdown which was followed by bouts of depression and related illness. This fact caused her profound interest in the Anglo-Catholic movement that was part of the Church of England (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 2008). In the early 60’s, she was in love with Charles Cayley, but according to her brother William, she refused to marry him because “she enquired into his creed and found he was not a Christian” (Victorian Web, 1988).
Christina began to write at the age of seven, but she was thirty-one when her first work was published: “Goblin Market and other poems” (1862), a collection of poems interpreted in a variety of ways as an allegory about temptation of salvation; a commentary on Victorian gender roles and female agency; and a work about erotic desire and social redemption (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 2008).
Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was able to convince a famous publisher in England, Alexander Macmillan, to publish three of Christina’s poems in Macmillian’s Magazine. One of the poems “Uphill” was the first to receive wide attention and remains one of her finest works. This poem is a parable about salvation, the steep ascent with comfort at the end represented by an inn (Victorian Web, 1991).
Rossetti continued to write and publish for the rest of her life, although she focused primarily on devotional writing and children’s poetry. Until and after the day of her death in 1894, she has been a very respected writer and her reputation will be conserved and admitted into the Victorian literary canon forever.
One of the difficulties that Christina had to be able to face in her life was the condition of women in a world extremely dominated by man. If we have a concise reference to the social context in which women were implied, we will realise that it is logical to think that this period had the necessity of a great change, a set of important modifications where woman could have her own role in life as a woman, not as a symbol of desire, motherhood or a dependent wife, especially. The question of woman is starting to come to light. The debate about women’s roles reflects a more basic argument about the very nature of women. John Stuart Mill argues in The Subjection of Women that “what is now called the nature of woman is eminently an artificial thing –the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others”. The king, in Tennyson’s The Princess, voices a more traditional view:
Man for the field and woman for the hearth:
Man for the sword and for the needle she:
Man with the head and woman with the heart:
Man to command and woman to obey.
The reaction against this point of view according to many authors of this period can be seen in some later works, for example, in Jane Eyre, by Jane Austen, where she articulates passionately the view that women are not different from men, but need a field of action much as their brothers do (The Norton Anthology of English literature, 2003-2008). It is true that men can have a great power of influence over women in daily life referring to society and culture. As I have said before, it was her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti who convinces Alexander Macmillan to publish some of her poems. The influence of a man in terms of literature in this period is essential to be considered as a female poet. In the early nineteenth century writing was still seen as a predominantly male preserve (Poet Seers, 2007). For this reason, the help of a man to raise a woman was indispensably necessary. The representation of a man speaking for a woman. In Victorian poetry, the actual female figure or her voice is often represented or repressed in a way that reduces her to a fixed meaning.
By the 1860’s, changing ideas about women had gained sufficient currency that writers began to represent the modern woman as a new type. Novelists in the last decade of the century began representing the “new woman” as a character type. One example is George Gissing’s The Odd Women, or women without husbands. It is a model of independence of women opposite to men. Is indispensable for woman to marry a man to live, to maintain a position or a reputation, or simply to feel like a social woman? Gissing’s novel tries to give an answer to this question tracing the fortunes of five “odd women”, who must make their own living. One of them, Mary Barfoot, uses her modest inheritance to train women for work in offices and persuade them of the importance of a women’s revolution (The Norton Anthology, 2003-2008). A time where women are working to claim their rights. The spirit of freedom and fight against conservative ideas is taking place and end up with the idealization of a crying woman or without any force to fight against society (Victorian Web, 2003-2008).
BIOGRAPHICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT OF DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
Gabriel Pasquale Giuseppe Rossetti was born in London, in 1828. Brother of the poet Christina Rossetti and the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood with John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, other artists. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English artists (painters, poets and critics) founded in 1848 whose intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on academic teaching of art, and they based their movement in the concepts of mimesis and imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art.
Opposite to Christina, he was educated at King’s College School and early he started to show a great interest in Italian art and a wish to be a painter. Regarding art, he was always more interested in the Medieval than in the modern side of the movement, adopting the stylistic characteristics of the early Italians. Many of the ladies he portrayed have the image of idealized Botticelli’s Venus, who was supposed to portray Simonetta Vespucci. (Wikipedia: Tthe Free Encyclopedia, 2008). In 1860, he married Elizabeth Siddal, who became an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. After her death from a self-administered overdose of morphia in 1862, he continued painting and writing poetry. Another of his models, Fanny Cornforth (who appears in Bocca Baciata, The Blue Bowe, and Found), became his mistress and housekeeper, but because of her full-bodied blondness, never one of his idealized women. That role was filled first by Lizzie Siddal; occasionally by models like Ruth Herbert and Annie Miller; but most famously by Janey Morris. Rossetti’s choice of models and his idealization of them helped change the concept of feminine beauty in the Victorian period to the tall, thin, long-necked, long-haired stunners of frail health that we see in paintings like Beata Beatrix, Pandora, Proserpine, La Pia, and La Donna della Finestra (Victorianweb, 1988). One of his most relevant characteristics is that he accompanies his pictures with poems. Each one of his paintings is related to one of his own poems. That is to say, Rossetti executes a painting and then writes a poem. Only in one case is the textual work which precedes the pictorial work. It is the case of The Blessed Damozel. While he was working on his first major painting, The Girlhood of Mary Virgin, he wrote a sonnet to accompany the picture. When the painting was exhibited, the pair of sonnets was attached to the picture frame on a piece of gold-leaf paper as an accompanying textual component. So using the title The Girlhood of Mary Virgin may designate simultaneously the sonnets he wrote, the painting he completed in the same period, and the composite set of all the textual and visual materials that affect the visionary project of that name. It defines what has come to be known as Rossetti’s “double work of art” (Rossetti archive, 2004).
In his works, he shows a special interest in nature, beauty, physical eroticism, sensuality and an obsession for exotic animals. One of the principal differences to establish regarding to Christina Rossetti is the lack of religious treatment. The importance that Christina gives to God and Heaven is not comparable to the consideration of Dante Gabriel Rossetti with that topic. There was no personal religious crisis and, in fact, he rejected a Christian art as a model to follow in his poetry and paintings. He is basing his works in a complete physical world, where he finds all that he needs, beauty in nature, women or materialism that exist and he is able to live, to experiment. His heaven was a heaven of earthly pleasure. His God smiled approvingly on the lover’s embrace (Victorian Web, 1988). He drew inspiration for all of his work from personal experience whereas his sister centralizes her ideas in metaphysical matters, beyond the existence of human being and a love which lives not only on Earth, but also in Heaven. In fact, according to Christina Rossetti, truly love is not physical; it does not exist physically, since this world is corrupted and full of extreme coldness without being involved in an emotional love, but in a sexualized love.
In 1870, Dante Gabriel Rossetti published a volume of poems called “Poems By D. G. Rossetti”. The eroticism and sensuality of the poems caused offence. One poem, “Nuptial Sleep”, described a couple falling asleep after sex. This was part of Rossetti’s sonnet sequence The House of Life, a complex series of poems tracing the physical and spiritual development of an intimate relationship. He described it as a “moment’s monument” implying that it contains the feelings of a fleeting moment. In 1881, he published a second volume of poems, “Ballads and Sonnets” which included the remaining sonnets from the “The House of Life” sequence. Finally, increasing a mental instability and darkened by his drug addiction to choral, he died in 1882, leaving a very significant legacy in the Victorian poetry.
LITERARY WORKS BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI
Christina Rossetti’s first verses were written in 1842 and printed in the private press of her grandfather. In 1850, under the pseudonym Ellen Alleyne, she contributed seven poems to the short-lived Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ, founded by one of her brothers and his friends (Petri Liukkonen, 2000). It was the beginning of a Victorian author in poetry providing early evidence of her poetic talent.
In her collection of works, we can point out some of them as the most significant voice in the Victorian poetry. One example of this fact is her best-known work “Goblin Market and Other Poems”, published in 1862. Another of her most popular works is “Sing-Song. A Nursery Rhyme Book”, illustrated by Arthur Hughes, a Pre-Raphaelite painter and a book illustrator, in 1872 (Petri Liukkonen, 2000). All her complete literary work is shown later:
Published Volumes:
Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
The Prince's Progress (1866)
Commonplace and Other Stories (1870)
Sing-Song. A Nursery Rhyme Book (1872)
Discussion
A Pageant and Other Poems (1881)
New Poems (1896)
Individual Poems:
"After Death"
"Another Spring"
"At Home"
"A Ballad of Boding"
"A Better Resurrection"
"The Convent Threshold"
"Goblin Market"
"Good Friday"
"The Heart Knoweth Its Own Bitterness"
"Maude Clare"
"May"
"An Old World Thicket"
"The Prince's Progress"
"Remember"
"Sapho"
"Spring"
"Song"
"Songs in a Cornfield"
"The Thread of Life"
"Who Will Deliver Me?"
(Victorian web, 2006)
LITERARY WORKS BY DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
If there is something important to point out in the poetic works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is the close and intimate relationship between his paintings and his poems. His literacy is expressing in writing what his paintings are showing to world, to the society’s eyes. A physical world translated into the figure of woman, nature or references to the idea of beauty in every single physical thing. One of his most famous poems is a great example of this fact: The Blessed Damozel, which was an imitation of John Keats, one of the most popular and known Romantic poets, and was published in The Germ in 1850 (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 2008). It is clear that it is not possible to separate his poetic works from art. Even many people think that he was more appreciated as a painter than as a poet. Independently of if that is true or not, what is evident is that he was a very significant part in both different ways of art.
His complete literary works are the following ones:
Poetry:
"The Blessed Damozel"
"The Burden of Nineveh"
"For an Annunciation, Early German"
"For a Venetian Pastoral"
"The Girlhood of Mary Virgin" (1849)
“The House of Life”
"Jenny"
"The Last Confession"
"My Sister's Sleep"
"The Passover in the Holy Family" (1856)
"The Portrait"
"Sea-Limits"
"Staff and Scrip"
"Troy Town"
"The Woodspurge”
(Victorian web, 2004)
It is also relevant to say that in 1861, Rossetti published The Early Italian Poets, a set of English translations of Italian poetry including Dante Alighieri’s La Vita Nuova, a design inspired by his admiration for the medieval writer Dante Alighieri and his attempt to imitate him (Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 2008).
THEMES AND GENDER MATTERS IN CHRISTINA ROSSETTI AND DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI’S POETRY
In this part of the paper, I will try to analyse both poetic works to establish the similarities and differences between both authors and how they can deal with the same topic and differ from the issue or treatment of diverse themes. As I have said before, Christina Rossetti as well as Dante Gabriel Rossetti were living in the same period of time. For this reason, themes can be the same referring to the interest or preoccupation about one or another. But, it is important to point out that the treatment of each one of their topics is quite different when one author or another reflects them in their works. Love, society, beauty, women, nature, God, religion and other Victorian topics are present in both of them, but the conception differs from one to another author. Dealing with the principal themes which appear in Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s works, I will explain the different points of view that the authors want to transmit through their poetic works.
Love in Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Christina Rossetti fell in love twice in her life. The paradoxical character of Christina’s genius when she was in love can be seen from the poems which she then wrote. In her, the idea of love turned inexorably to the idea of death and in this association we can surely see her instinctive shrinking from the surrender which love demands. In her poems, Christina is obsessed with the idea of death (Victorian web, 2007). In “Remember”, she asks her beloved to remember her when she is dead because that is all that he will be able to do for her:
Yet if you should forget me for awile
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that I once had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.
She wants to transmit that love has an inevitable death, as well. In the following two stanzas, belonging to her poem “Autumn”, we can see its death:
Care flieth,
Hope and Fear together:
Love dieth
In the Autumn weather.
For a friend
Even Care is pleasant:
When Fear doth end
Hope is no more present:
Autumn silences the turtle-dove:
In blank Autumn who could speak of love?
There is also in the poem a certain rejection to love as if she felt that the claims of love were not for her, that her way of life was unsuited to it, and that she must go back to her old denials and refusals. She fights against human instincts to keep them in control and maintain a metaphysical love, rejecting this way the physical love of a man. Another essential point to understand this fact is to put on evidence that she is an extremely devout Christian and for her, God is always present. Her love is for God. She feels completely satisfied with that metaphysical love and her admiration for human beings is perturbed by this love for God. Christ had become “the ideal lover” and the only one to satisfy her needs. It is suitable to remember that she never married and this lack of a figure of man in her daily life and her devotion for religion are taken into account to understand. Moreover, she relates love for a man to sexualized woman and what she is looking for is an emotional love, a great emotional complexity which she finds in God (Victorian web, 2007). An example within “Monna Innominata” which talks about how the narrator tells her lover that God must come first:
“Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke,
I love, as you would have me, God the most;
Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost” (p. 297).
On the contrary, Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a person who fell in love easily with a woman. The beauty of her expressions, her body and her role captivated him taking it form in a painting and, later, in a poem. He was married Elizabeth Siddal, who became an important part of his poetic, artistic and, logically, his personal life. The idealization of women is a clear characteristic that we can find in many of his poems, reflecting, at the same time, the idea of a physical love motivated by sexuality and sensuality. In one of his poems (“Sonnet VI: The Kiss” belonging to “The House of Life”), he explores the sentiments felt on a wedding day, which can be considered as one of the most important days to exalt love. He tries to reflect his love meaning both the woman he loves and his own capacity to love:
For lo! even now my lady's lips did play
With these my lips such consonant interlude
As laurelled Orpheus longed for when he wooed
The half-drawn hungering face with that last lay.
I was a child beneath her touch, a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,
A spirit when her spirit looked through me,
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity.
The narrator’s wife seems to fulfil many of his needs: she is varyingly a maternal figure, a lover and a personification of God. This passage seems to suggest that loves ends with the end of live. The death coincides with the death of love’s passion, as well. Analysing the figure of God, the difference of treatment is clear with regard to Christina Rossetti. She exemplifies her love in God, whereas he represents God in a woman. A physical appearance of divinity. He creates woman in a manner which clearly expresses a certain adoration and love for the female form and its beauty. A flourishing sensuality combined with a representation of romantic love. He also establishes a spiritualized vision of romantic love which goes beyond a simple adoration of beauty. The poems imply deeper connection between the lovers that brings them together, that drives the passion of their feelings and that causes the grief which occurs while apart (Victorian web, 2004).
Representation of woman in Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry
Christina Rossetti lived in first person the consequences of consciousness within the Victorian period: the mentality that claims a society dominated by men and which considered woman as an object. She is an author who provides a unique rebuttal to these ideas in many of her poems. One example is the poem “Song”. Here, Rossetti voices the inner thoughts of a dead Victorian woman. As though in response to her brother’s poem, “The Blessed Damozel” in which a woman, tortured by her feelings of loss for her lover, stirs in Heaven, Christina Rossetti’s woman in “Song” feels no pain or loss, but only peace:
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me;
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree.
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on as if in pain.
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
She paints a picture of Heaven devoid of human earthly desire. Her woman does not pine for her lover. She states that she might actually forget him altogether in time. Rossetti’s woman, not a mercy of her lover, finds herself free of desire for him. The author’s love translates from earthly passion to a peaceful and higher spirituality
(Victorian web, 2003).
Another interesting poem in which we can analyse a feminine role and establish a link between the repression of woman in the ancient Greek and the Victorian Era is the poem dedicated to one of the best feminine writers of literature: Sappho.
Two different lives with an important common hardship, a hardship brought on by men. Sappho and Christina Rossetti live in a period of time where “she” is not allowed a voice or a place in a man’s world. “She” must go against the male-dominated grain and create her own voice and place worthly of recognition. Society which prize the achievements of men over women. Sappho’s poetry represents the point of view of a woman, a woman that wrote where she was and while she was, and maybe for no other reason than to just write (Victorian Web, 2000). The poem that Christina writes about this author is the following one:
I sigh at day-dawn, and I sigh
When the dull day is passing by,
I sigh at evening, and again
I sigh when night brings sleep to men.
Oh! It were better far to die
Than thus for ever mourn and sigh,
And in death's dreamless sleep to be
Unconscious that none weep for me;
Eased from my weight of heaviness,
Forgetful of forgetfulness,
Resting from pain and care and sorrow
Thro' the long night that knows no morrow;
Living unloved, to die unknown,
Unwept, untended and alone.
In another of her poems called “Goblin Market”, Christina introduces a new feminine role: a conservative woman. The obvious theme might be that one should be careful of temptation or that little girls should not talk to strange men. Throughout the poem, Lizzie, the protagonist, remains pure. The role of the unstained virgin has existed longer than the English language (Victorian Web, 1990):
Full of wise upbraidings:
Dear, you should not stay so late,
Twilight is not good for maidens;
Should not loiter in the glen
In the haunts of goblin men.
The representation of woman in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry differs clearly from his sister’s. A dreaming damozel in Heaven, a young girl crying silently, a suffering Madonna or a sleeping prostitute are some of the different representations which he leads to end with the images of passivity and subservience that often characterize the female in Victorian literature (Victorian Web, 2003).
Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Jenny” exemplifies the idea of men as active, controlling subjects and women as passive objects of desire. Jenny assumes a completely passive position as she is asleep with her head upon the speaker’s knee. This fact makes her unable to talk and defend herself when the speaker voices his impressions and accusations of her (Victorian Web, 2003):
If of myself you think at all,
What is the thought? conjectural
On sorry matters best unsolved?
Or inly is each grace revolved
To fit me with a lure? or (sad
To think!) perhaps you're merely glad
That I'm not drunk or ruffianly
And let you rest upon my knee.
“The Girlhood of Mary Virgin” is perhaps the representation of his first Fair Lady: the Virgin Mary. “Ecce Ancilla Domini” also centers around his fascination with her. It portrays Mary as an emaciated and repressed teenage girl who embodied all virtue, representing again the feminine beauty. This poem forms a group of allegorical, mythical, literary and historical figures with some conceptual significance beyond the apparent physical representation. The attraction for the representation of women in religious terms is taken place in this poem (Victorian Web, 2004):
This is that blessed Mary, pre-elect,
God's Virgin. Gone is a great while, and she
Dwelt young in Nazareth of Galilee.
Unto God's will she brought devout respect,
Profound simplicity of intellect,
And supreme patience. From her mother's knee
Faithful and hopeful; wise in charity;
Strong in grave peace; in pity circumspect.
The longing for Motherhood in the poetry of Christina Rossetti
The poem “Sing-Song” marks a good-bye to the possibility of having a child, the longing for a child. After recovering from her illness, she started again to write and develop her own feelings. Her desire for a child and the longing for a husband did not end. The wish for a baby is in her case the wish for a partner and for the sexuality out of which a child is conceived. There is a desire to care for somebody, and, at the same time, she shows a wish for somebody to care for her. As a child wants to be touched, cared and kissed, she wants to be, too (Victorian Web, 2007):
My baby has a mottled fist,
My baby has a neck in creases;
My baby kisses and is kissed,
For he's the very thing for kisses.(428)
"Cuddle and love me, cuddle and love me,"
crows the mouth of coral pink:
Oh the bald head, and oh the sweet lips,
And oh the sleepy eyes that wink. (442)
The celebration of the unity of matter and spirit in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems
This celebration of the unity of matter and spirit stands in contrast to the lament of Christina Rossetti that spirit, which is more valuable and more real, cannot be represented except indirectly through matter. However, whereas Christina equates spirit with religion, Dante has a more humanistic view of spirit, which must be more accessible to humans in order to be relevant. Dante’s universe does not seem to involve anything beyond human experience (such as God or Heaven) where spirit could be located, so he must conceive of spirit as something that has a place in human experience. He must therefore give a different account of the nature of spirit from that of his sister, which he attempts through numerous devices with varying degrees of success.
CONCLUSION
To conclude this paper, I would like to resume briefly the different conceptions of both authors. The first time I saw their names, I suppose that their literary lives would be similar or simultaneous by being brother and sister and sharing the same surname. But, penetrating in both biographies and their complete literary works and analysing the different treatment of every topic that they are dealing with, it is evident to realize that the mentality of Christina and Dante Gabriel Rossetti are actually contradictory. The woman and man condition is, principally, a very important characteristic to take into account regarding to social, political, economical and literary life, above all in 19th Century, the Victorian Era in England. The most important, in this case, is that nowadays we have the great opportunity to talk about that and be aware of its value. A piece of paper where a person started to write his feelings, thoughts and reflect reality, the reality of his period and, thanks to that fact, we are able to think about all changes that have taken place on it. A very interesting way of seeing reality from another point of view and value all positive changes with the creation of choices to improve our life as literary authors.
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- “Dante Gabriel Rossetti: lover of body and spirit”, Joshua Bocher, 26th December 2004, The Victorian Web, 16-01-08: http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/bocher2.html
- “The Rossetti archives doubleworks”, Jerome J. McGann, 2004, The Rossetti archives, 16-01-08: http://www.rossettiarchive.org/racs/doubleworks.rac.html
- “Dante Gabriel Rossetti”, Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, 16th January 2008, 16-01-08: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dante_Gabriel_Rossetti
- “Christina Rossetti”, Sri Chinmoy Centre, 2004, poet seer, 16-01-08: http://www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/british_poets/rossetti/
- “The Victorian Age”, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 2003-2008, Norton and Company, 16-01-08: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/topic_2/welcome.htm
- “Christina Georgina Rossetti collection”, Linda Leeuwrik, 9th January 2006, Bryn Mawr College library special collections, 16-01-08: http://www.brynmawr.edu/Library/speccoll/guides/rossetti.shtml