Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was born in London to the Italian political exile and Dante scholar Gabriele Rossetti and Frances Polidori, and grew up in a household steeped in art and literature alongside her brothers Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, and William Michael Rossetti, critic and editor; she herself modeled for several early Pre-Raphaelite paintings and contributed poems to the Brotherhood's short-lived magazine The Germ under a pseudonym. A devout Anglo-Catholic, she twice broke off engagements over religious differences with her suitors and never married, and for a decade volunteered at a refuge for former prostitutes in Highgate. Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862) established her reputation, its title poem's vivid, ambiguous fable of two sisters and forbidden fruit becoming one of the most widely anthologised poems of the Victorian era; The Prince's Progress and Other Poems (1866) followed, along with devotional verse, children's poems, and short stories. Her carol "In the Bleak Midwinter," written as a poem in the 1870s, was set to music after her death and remains a Christmas standard. Chronically ill for much of her adult life — first with a condition resembling angina, later with Graves' disease — she died in London of breast cancer at sixty-three.