Historical figure · Pearson Edexcel International GCSE revision on Incandio

Christina Rossetti

Who Took Back What She Asked For · Poet · 1830–1894

The poet who refused two marriages on grounds of belief, wrote Goblin Market, and spent her life being looked at as a model.

Defend these ideas against Rossetti

Incandio is a free revision platform for the Pearson Edexcel International GCSE, and on it a topic counts as mastered only once you have learned it, proved it in questions, taught it back and defended it against the person with the strongest claim on it. Christina Rossetti is that person for one topic on the course:

• Remember in Remember — English Literature

Who was Rossetti?

Christina Rossetti was born in London in 1830 to an exiled Italian poet and scholar and an English mother, into a household where everybody wrote. Her brother Dante Gabriel became the painter and poet of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; her brother William Michael was its secretary and later her editor; her sister Maria became an Anglican nun. She wrote Remember in 1849, at nineteen — a Petrarchan sonnet whose octave asks, six times over, to be remembered after death, and whose sestet turns and takes the whole request back, preferring that the man should forget and smile rather than remember and be sad. Goblin Market appeared in 1862 and made her reputation. Her High Anglican faith governed her life at real cost: she broke her engagement to the painter James Collinson when he returned to Roman Catholicism, and refused Charles Cayley, whom she loved, because he was not a believer. For over a decade she did volunteer work at a penitentiary for former prostitutes at Highgate. From 1871 she suffered from Graves' disease, which altered her appearance and ended her social life, and she died of cancer in 1894. Her brother's circle had used her as a model when she was a girl, and she spent the rest of her life being seen as one thing while writing another.

Major achievements

• Remember (1849), written at nineteen
• Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)
• In the Bleak Midwinter, later set as a carol
• Was seriously considered for the Laureateship after Tennyson's death
• Made renunciation into a subject with an argument in it

Life in brief

• 1830 — Born in London: Daughter of an exiled Italian poet and scholar.
• 1848 — The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood: Founded by her brother; she models and writes.
• 1849 — Remember: A Petrarchan sonnet, written at nineteen.
• 1850 — Breaks her engagement: To James Collinson, when he returns to Rome.
• 1859 — Highgate penitentiary: Begins over a decade of volunteer work there.
• 1862 — Goblin Market: Published, and makes her reputation.
• 1871 — Graves' disease: Ends her public life and alters her appearance.
• 1894 — Dies in London: Of cancer, aged sixty-four.

Explore the life of Rossetti — five chapters

1. A House Where Everybody Wrote — An Italian exile's daughter in Bloomsbury
2. The Turn — A sonnet written at nineteen that reverses itself
3. Two Refusals — What her belief actually cost her
4. Goblin Market and the Highgate Penitentiary — A famous poem, and ten years of work nobody talks about
5. Illness, and a Reputation That Kept Rising — Forty years out of sight, and a standing above her brother's

Read the five-chapter life of Christina Rossetti →

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