A contemporary of Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti wrote more than a thousand poems in her lifetime, most of them while standing at the washstand in the corner of her room. But she was not a recluse. As the sister of Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, she served as a model for him and his friends, more than once as the Virgin Mary. But she was a devout Anglican and a better poet than any of them.
Keenly aware of being a woman in a man’s game, her writing is marked by a feeling of “otherness”, often loss, sometimes deprivation. After Elizabeth Barrett Browning died, Rossetti became the new “female laureate” and the champion of women in the arts. Her reputation has grown steadily over the years.
