Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography

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'Jan Marsh's book is the best researched and fullest biography of Rossetti we have yet had.' Fiona MacCarthy, New York Review of Books 'Although never formally part of the Pre-Raphaelite poetic school, which included her brother Gabriel, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne, Christina Rossetti has always been linked to it. [Jan Marsh] gives full attention to both the individual and her unique variety of fantastic and devotional poetry... Marsh delineates an appealing person while examining her adolescent nervous breakdown, abortive engagement to a lapsed Catholic painter, frustrated love for an absentminded scholar, and relationships with her devout but hearty sister, Maria, and with her brothers... The author's steady, sympathetic course through Rossetti's divided life enables readers to delve into the intense and original self most fully expressed in her poetry.' Kirkus Review

Jan Marsh's first major book was a critical biography of the poet Edward Thomas, which foreshadowed many of the themes in Back to the Land. Since then she has published the pioneering study Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood followed by biographies of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, together with books on women in English country houses and in the Bloomsbury movement. She has curated several exhibitions, including Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists, Black Victorians and Rossetti rerturns to Vasto (in Italy). Her next publication will be the collected Correspondence of Jane Morris, edited with Frank Sharp. Faber Finds is reissuing Back to the Land, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti.