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culture travels ever further away from the kind of biblical literacy that Christina (and even Sisson) assumed. The Book of Common Prayer and the King James’ Bible no longer supply a common literary substrate between writers in English, if they ever did. In offering a wider selection of her poems shaped by her Anglo-Catholicism – by turns, lavish in its devotion and, yet, austere and reserved in what it might say of the Sacred – I hope to invite readers to make faithful, yet daring readings of both her most seemingly secular as well as her vast oeuvre of devotional writings. However, before treating with Rossetti’s faith and religion, there is a dimension that simply cannot be ignored: the impact on reading Rossetti generated by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite …’ – choose your metaphor here – ‘… Juggernaut’, ‘… Industry’, ‘…  Behemoth’ and so on. Despite the relative brevity of its existence, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which her brother Dante Gabriel was the most famous member, continues to exercise a significant grip on ideas about midto-late nineteenth century art and culture. For good or ill, any kind of study of Christina’s poetry – certainly the poetry of her most-famous phase, which includes 1862’s Goblin Market and other poems – needs to wrestle with the curious shadow cast by Dante Gabriel, the Pre-Raphaelites and their advocates into the twenty-first century.While there has been some fascinating critical push-back recently, in which women artists like Evelyn de Morgan and critics such as Joanna Boyce have been ‘recovered’ from the long, sometimes unappealing shadows of Millais and Burne-Jones, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ aesthetics continue to operate predominantly through a male gaze, constructing women as tragic muses. It is always risky to load too much significance on a single poem. However, In an Artist’s Studio, written in 1856 but only published after Christina’s death, is a genuinely fascinating text. It both offers some suggestive ways to delineate Rossetti’s 8
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relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and indicates fruitful directions for reading her work post-Sisson (who didn’t include the poem in his Carcanet selection). William Michael’s note on the poem in the 1904 Complete Poems says that this Petrarchan sonnet refers ‘apparently to our brother’s studio, and to his constantly-repeated heads of the lady whom he afterwards married, Miss Siddal’: One face looks out from all his canvasses,  One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;  We found her hidden just behind those screens,  That mirror gave back all her loveliness.  A queen in opal or in ruby dress,  A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,  A saint, an angel; – every canvass means  The same one meaning, neither more nor less.  He feeds upon her face by day and night,  And she with true kind eyes looks back on him  Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:  Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;  Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;  Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.  Clearly, given its Petrarchan form, it displays Christina in argumentative mood. The opening octave serves to set up the argument or proposition of the poem, while the closing twin tercets or sestet serves to offer a resolution. Within this structure the volta in the ninth line presents ‘a turn’ in the argument. If the sonnet form is, by convention, a poem of love, In an Artist’s Studio perhaps offers an insight into the feminist edge present in Christina’s poetry: for it constitutes a cutting critique of the ways in which the female model is painted, ‘framed’ and controlled by the male artist. In its repeated use of ‘one face’, ‘one selfsame figure’ and ‘same one meaning’ 9

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culture travels ever further away from the kind of biblical literacy that Christina (and even Sisson) assumed. The Book of Common Prayer and the King James’ Bible no longer supply a common literary substrate between writers in English, if they ever did. In offering a wider selection of her poems shaped by her Anglo-Catholicism – by turns, lavish in its devotion and, yet, austere and reserved in what it might say of the Sacred – I hope to invite readers to make faithful, yet daring readings of both her most seemingly secular as well as her vast oeuvre of devotional writings.

However, before treating with Rossetti’s faith and religion, there is a dimension that simply cannot be ignored: the impact on reading Rossetti generated by the ‘Pre-Raphaelite …’ – choose your metaphor here – ‘… Juggernaut’, ‘… Industry’, ‘…  Behemoth’ and so on. Despite the relative brevity of its existence, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, of which her brother Dante Gabriel was the most famous member, continues to exercise a significant grip on ideas about midto-late nineteenth century art and culture. For good or ill, any kind of study of Christina’s poetry – certainly the poetry of her most-famous phase, which includes 1862’s Goblin Market and other poems – needs to wrestle with the curious shadow cast by Dante Gabriel, the Pre-Raphaelites and their advocates into the twenty-first century.While there has been some fascinating critical push-back recently, in which women artists like Evelyn de Morgan and critics such as Joanna Boyce have been ‘recovered’ from the long, sometimes unappealing shadows of Millais and Burne-Jones, ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ aesthetics continue to operate predominantly through a male gaze, constructing women as tragic muses.

It is always risky to load too much significance on a single poem. However, In an Artist’s Studio, written in 1856 but only published after Christina’s death, is a genuinely fascinating text. It both offers some suggestive ways to delineate Rossetti’s

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