Christina Rossetti Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Antony H. Harrison

Critical Essay by Antony H. Harrison

SOURCE: "Christina Rossetti and the Sage Discourse of Feminist High Anglicanism," in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, edited by Thais E. Morgan, Rutgers University Press, 1990, pp. 87-104.

In the following essay, Harrison explores the feminist leanings in Rossetti's works.

[W]hile knowledge runs apace, ignorance keeps ahead of knowledge: and all which the deepest students know proves to themselves, yet more convincingly than to others, that much more exists which still they know not. As saints in relation to spiritual wisdom, so sages in relation to intellectual wisdom, eating they yet hunger and drinking they yet thirst.

It may never indeed in this world be [God's] pleasure to grant us previsions of seers and forecastings of prophets: but He will assuredly vouchsafe us so much foresight and illumination as should suffice to keep us on the watch with loins girded...
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