Frances Spalding
Fine Lines
Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art
By Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans
Yale University Press 192pp £30
Christina Rossetti sits alongside Gerard Manley Hopkins as one of the two great religious poets of the 19th century. She is known to many through the only carol that does not tire with repetition – ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, for which she supplied the lyrics. Her liking for simple, austere words and phrases such as ‘bleak’, ‘frosty’, ‘made moan’ and ‘gone’, together with the rhythmic artfulness with which she handles short lines, gives her poetry a sense of tight control. This poet is also the woman who turned away two suitors on the grounds of religious incompatibility. Yet only recently has the complexity of her character and mind come to the fore. She repeatedly interrogates not only theological ideas and beliefs but also the accepted gender roles of her day and their relation to power. She published poems in early feminist periodicals, and volunteered at St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate, which encouraged vulnerable women to avoid prostitution by retraining them for domestic service.
What makes Christina Rossetti additionally fascinating is her close association with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. As a poet, she gained the respect of her family early on; in 1847, when she was sixteen, her maternal grandfather privately printed, for friends and family, a collection of her work under the title
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism.
@PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right.
Peter York - Deluxe Editions
Peter York: Deluxe Editions - When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines by Graydon Carter
literaryreview.co.uk
Henry James returned to America in 1904 with three objectives: to see his brother William, to deliver a series of lectures on Balzac, and to gather material for a pair of books about modern America.
Peter Rose follows James out west.
Peter Rose - The Restless Analyst
Peter Rose: The Restless Analyst - Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age by Peter Brooks...
literaryreview.co.uk
Vladimir Putin served his apprenticeship in the KGB toward the end of the Cold War, a period during which Western societies were infiltrated by so-called 'illegals'.
Piers Brendon examines how the culture of Soviet spycraft shaped his thinking.
Piers Brendon - Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll
Piers Brendon: Tinker, Tailor, Sleeper, Troll - The Illegals: Russia’s Most Audacious Spies and the Plot to Infiltrate the West by Shaun Walker
literaryreview.co.uk