Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti

by Christina Rossetti and D. Kent

Book Overview

Christina Rossetti is recognized as the leading woman poet of the nineteenth century in England. Despite recent attention to her life in the form of three new biographies and to her poetry, Rossetti's prose works remain largely inaccessible to students and scholars. For the first time, an edited volume of selected prose by this important Victorian woman artist is made available to her readers. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti presents the prose...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 031215903X
• ISBN13: 9780312159030
• Release Date: May 1998
• Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan
• Length: 404 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 5.9" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

More than a Poet: Rossetti and her Prose

With the recent scholarly and popular interest Christina Rossetti's poetry has inspired, P. G. Stanwood and David A. Kent's Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti could not have been published at a more opportune time. Stanwood and Kent point out that though Rossetti was a deeply religious woman and that bulk of her poetry was devotional and her prose religious, scholarship has, as of yet, paid little attention to any but her more secular work. And though there have been a few recently published anthologies of Rossetti's work, these anthologies pay scant attention to her prose. Almost none of her prose has been published since the first editions of the nineteenth century, and these editions are extremely difficult to find. Stanwood and Kent's book provides generous excerpts from all of Rossetti's prose, both her short stories and her religious work. The introductions to each of the excerpts provide publication histories and synopses of the whole works, and the endnotes and the lengthy general introduction provide a highly valuable background to Rossetti's life and work. The recent attention to Rossetti's poetry, viz. "Goblin Market", has drawn attention to Rossetti's imaginative powers and to her literary genius, but Selected Prose reveals a new dimension of Rossetti's mind and interests--she was a woman of a sensitive and powerful intellect, and her grasp and treatment of theological issues is astute and bold for a woman of her time. Anyone seriously interested in Rossetti's work ought to read her prose.