Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti

Christina Rossetti is one of the best known and loved of Victorian poets, yet only recently has she emerged from comparative critical obscurity. This is partly due to a late 20th-century rediscovery of women writers and partly because of a renewed interest in Victorian culture. Although Rossetti’s poetry is readily available, her prose works have remained largely ignored.Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti is the first book to address this deficiency by making accessible reliable texts illustrative of all her prose. The editors have collected selections of Rossetti’s prose in its three modes: fiction, non-fiction, and devotional. Rossetti wrote prose all her life, beginning with fiction, and continued with moral tales, stories for children, and thoughtful articles on such literary figures as Petrarch, Dante, and Leopardi. But above all else, she wrote devotional books. She wrote six religious works, first the brief Annus Domini and lastly the massive work on the Apocalypse,The Face of the Deep, published shortly before her death. This groundbreaking anthology helps to reveal Rossetti’s deep personal faith while also illuminating nineteenth-century religious thought and spirituality.

David A. Kent teaches at Centennial College in Toronto. He edited The Achievement of Christina Rossetti and Christian Poetry in Canada.

P. G. Stanwood is Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. He edited John Cosin’s A Collection of Private Devotions and Henry More’s Democritus Platonissans.