Christina Rossetti is a major poet of the nineteenth century. After decades of critical marginalization and neglect in the first half of the twentieth century, she is now widely recognized as a crucially important Victorian writer and one of the best women poets of all time. In a 1998 review of Victorian poetry in the Times Literary Supplement, Nicholas Shrimpton rightly comments on Rossetti's status, claiming that her ‘elevation to the premier league is unmistakable’; she has moved ‘firmly into the first rank.’

This study does not dwell upon Rossetti's life, nor does it pay detailed attention to the Pre-Raphaelite sphere in which her art developed, since Jan Marsh's Christina Rossetti: A Literary Biography (1994) thoroughly pursues the connections between life and work and provides a wealth of information about the literary, artistic, and familial contexts in which her early writings were produced. Rather, this book focuses on three aspects of Rossetti's work primarily through readings of specific texts: Chapter 1, entitled ‘Mind’, examines the imaginative challenges involved in reading Rossetti and explores the unique ways in which she poses problems for interpreters. Her delight in language, her love of mystery, and her wry sense of humour are central to her art and it is these dispositions that the texts considered in this chapter conspicuously display. Chapter 2, ‘Body’, then turns to consider Rossetti as cultural critic, focusing upon the ways in which she writes about sexuality, women, and the body in Victorian culture. The representational indeterminacy and instability emphasized in Chapter 1 reappear in Chapter 2, but here ‘dreaming through the twilight’ is modified by sustained attention to social concerns and an attendant, irrepressible desire to break the silence and speak out.

In the final chapter of this book – ‘Spirit’ – I turn to Rossetti's devotional writings and to the ways that, even in apparently orthodox religious poetry and prose, extraordinary and unpredictable turns occur. As with any literary form or tradition that she encountered, from the sonnet to the fairy tale, from seventeenthcentury poetry to Romanticism, in her devotional work Rossetti subtly, quietly, alters conventional interpretations, pretending as so often, that she is doing nothing of the kind.