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