The youngest of four children in a family of scholars and artists, Christina Georgina Rossetti was born in 1830. Her mother, Frances Polidori, was a staunch Anglican of English and Italian descent, who had earlier worked as a governess and made two unsuccessful attempts to run a day school. Her father, Gabriele, was a political refugee from Italy and a scholar in the writings of Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). Rossetti’s two brothers, Dante Gabriel and William Michael, helped found the prominent group of artists known as the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. A pre-Raphaelite quality of lush, even sensuous detail graces Christina Rossetti’s writing, as does a strong religious and moral sense; the mix made her particularly appealing to her contemporaries. Like her mother, Rossetti was a devout High Anglican, much influenced by a religious movement known as Tractarianism. Apparently for religious reasons, she twice declined offers of marriage. Rossetti spent most of her adulthood living in relative seclusion in London, where she cared for invalid relations, did charity work (particularly at the St. Mary Magdalene Home for Fallen Women), and pursued her writing. While she also wrote prose, she specialized in poetry, writing over 900 poems in English and 60 more in Italian.
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