CHRISTINA ROSSETTI: A Portrait with Background

By a poet in her own right, (Marya Zaturenska won the Pulitzer Prize in 1938), this is a warm and sympathetic approach to a colorful subject- but one which is marred by an exceedingly poor and sloppy style and a weak organization of her material. With all of her knowledge of the period and the starry names in the circle of Christina's friends, the biography still flickers like a faltering light. The author does manage to interest one in her subject, often by the long and beautiful quotations from the poems of surely one of the greatest English women poetesses. But she always fails in critical illumination, and falls victim herself to the fatal pre-raphaelite fault of nebulousness. Sharpest is the portrait of Christina herself, her austere Anglican and romantic Italian heritage which merged in a stream strangely rich and at the same time strangely self-annihilating. But on the whole the interpretation never reaches the structural completeness her subject demands.