Although she felt affection toward her father, she was much closer to her mother, from whom she inherited a strong lifelong religious commitment. Initially this commitment was Evangelical in orientation, but it became Anglo-Catholic in the early 1840s. It was shared by Maria (who, unlike Christina, possessed a religious vocation and ended her life as a member of an Anglican Sisterhood) but not by her father or by her brothers. The split between the claims of worldly passion and otherworldly faith which was to become central to Christina Rossetti's life and to her poetry may well have found its origins in this tension between her Italian and her English ancestry.
Christina Rossetti was especially close to her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori. When she was small, Polidori lived in the country, in Buckinghamshire. Christina stayed often at her grandfather's, and her early encounters with the countryside and its animal life profoundly affected her and left their mark on much of her poetry. In 1839 Polidori moved back to London and the visits to the countryside ceased. Considering Christina's love of nature, there is poignancy in the fact that she would spend most of the rest of her life in dark and gloomy London houses.
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