Critics

• "Maude Clare" engages in a discourse on hegemonic definitions of Victorian femininity.


  Andrew Stewart and Alexandra Russel
• Perhaps this ambiguity is more reflective on the actual position of women at the time however as the demographics in the population made it impossible for all women to accomplish the goals set for them by society, placing them in an ambiguous position indeed.


  Andrew Stewart and Alexandra Russel (Maude Clare)
• "Maude Clare" also emphasises the insidious effects on female relationships of women's powerlessness in the competitive marriage market


  Elizabeth K. Helsinger
• No Thank You John suggests its protagonist might replace the 'prison' of marriage with the free-range open fields of friendship.


  Eliza Ekstein Frankl
• composed in 1854 but never published in Rossetti's lifetime - possibly because of its unmistakable critique - the poem opens with an unflinching expression of despair


  Simon Avery on From the Antique
• so weary is the position of women that annihilation is preferable, since this would enable escape from gender expectations and imposed identities.


  Simon Avery on From the Antique
• Rossetti's poems encourage women to 'claim independence and agency'


  Simon Avery
• Rossetti steers away from equating female sexuality with sinfulness, which in itself is a radical move


  Karen Armstrong
• Christina Rossetti was an extremely devout Christian and her religious views affect everything she wrote, regardless of topic


  Joshua Bocher
• Regards Rossetti as a 'foremother of contemporary feminist theology'


  Marie Louise Luxemborg
• Rossetti 'could not escape feelings of inadequacy regarding her religious faith. She chooses to express this using time-old representations of the closed garden, with its connotations of the Garden of Eden, so perhaps there is also a sense in which she draws on ideas about Eve, Original Sin and the spiritual weakness of women, to explore female religious guilt and inadequacy.


  Aline Downey on Shut Out
• they possess an intellectual depth which shows Rossetti to be an astute questioner and analyst of her contemporary world.


  Simon Avery
• Writing at a time when established religious beliefs were being challenged by new developments in science ...Rossetti demonstrates one way in which a key Victorian writer examined the ambiguities of faith in a time of major change.


  Simon Avery
• The austere, deceptively simple language here - many of the words are monosyllabic - typically masks the complexities of religious thought that Rossetti's poetry often explores.


  Simon Avery on Up-Hill
• the 'birthday' is about the re-birth of the self into the next life or into a union with the divine


  Simon Avery on A Birthday
• The beautiful ornateness in this poem - which is unusual in Rossetti's work - piles up image after image in the style of a Pre-Raphaelite painting


  Simon Avery on A Birthday
• For all her constant talk of religion, Christina very seldom spoke of its joys.


  Frances Thomas
• 'Twice' offers a contrast between... spiritual and physical love.


  George Norton
• Certainly, 'Twice' seems to inscribe the paradox at the heart of Christian belief: one becomes free only by submitting to God.


  George Norton
• the wall he builds (literally and figuratively man-made) seems to function as a symbol of women's exclusion, one with which there can be no negotiation.


  George Norton on Shut Out
• Rossetti has radically rewritten the fall of Eve in terms of the social and spiritual abuse of women which she sees around her and included more than a hint that male gender oppression be interpreted as original sin.


  Lynda Palazzo on Goblin Market
• an alternative uncorrupted mode of social relation - the love of sisters that might place or counteract, that commercial, patriarchal relationships that underpin Victorian society.


  Jerome McGann on Goblin Market
• We feel the poem is telling us about a real event and giving us a vividly painful picture of the last moments of these two people.


  Suzanne Williams on In the Round Tower at Jhansi
• Rossetti creates a very conventional pairing. The husband is protector and the Wife is infantilised


  Suzanne Williams on In the Round Tower at Jhansi
• She is all womanly obedience and purity, he is stoical and masterly, yet tender too


  Suzanne Williams on In the Round Tower at Jhansi
• some of her other works, in many subtle ways she often seeks to subvert Victorian poetic and societal conventions...her female characters often defy the norms of Victorian womanhood


  Suzanne Williams
• her view of Empire in this poem is narrow, blinkered, and I hat to say it, cliched.


  Suzanne Williams on In the Round Tower at Jhansi
• she is, as all writers are, a product of her era and culture


  Suzanne Williams
• the poem can show us the importance of perspective and context ...now, from our postcolonial, twenty-first century perspective, we see the story as more complex


  Suzanne Williams on In the Round Tower at Jhansi