The poet behind In the Bleak Midwinter turned down three marriage proposals
Every Christmas, choirs sing words by Christina Rossetti, who also wrote the eerie Goblin Market. She posed as the Virgin Mary for her brother Dante Gabriel's first finished oil painting. Three men asked to marry her, and each time faith, family friction or plain disinclination led her to say no.
Rossetti was born in London in 1830, the youngest of four children of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian poet in political exile, and Frances Polidori. The household in Bloomsbury was bohemian and argumentative, full of visiting Italian scholars and revolutionaries, and steeped in Dante and Petrarch. The siblings produced a family magazine called the Hodge Podge, and Christina, a fiery-tempered child, dictated her first story to her mother before she could write. Her brothers went to boarding school while she and her sister Maria were taught at home.
Her father's health collapsed in the 1840s, the family grew poorer, and at fourteen Christina suffered a breakdown. She and the women of her family were drawn into the Anglo-Catholic movement, and religion became the centre of her life. Her first engagement, to the Pre-Raphaelite painter James Collinson, ended in 1850 when he returned to Catholicism. She later refused the painter John Brett, perhaps the subject of her poem No, Thank You, John, and in the 1860s declined the translator Charles Cayley because he was agnostic.
Her grandfather printed a small book of her verse for family in 1847, and she first appeared in her brother's Pre-Raphaelite journal The Germ under the name Ellen Alleyne. Goblin Market and Other Poems, published by Macmillan in 1862 with woodcuts by Dante Gabriel, made her name. John Ruskin complained about its irregular metre, but Tennyson, Swinburne and Hopkins praised it, and readers have seen it as a fable of temptation, of sisterhood, or of addiction and recovery. For about a decade she volunteered at a Highgate refuge for women leaving prostitution, which some think fed the poem. In the Artist's Studio, from 1856, gently skewers painters who paint one idealised model until every canvas means the same thing.
In the Bleak Midwinter was later set to music by Gustav Holst, among others. She died in 1894 and was buried at Highgate Cemetery. Her brother William afterwards destroyed many of her letters and papers to guard her reputation.
Source: Christina Rossetti
