Rossetti AO5

Marsh

‘She (Rossetti) was opposed to war, slavery, cruelty to animals, the exploitation of girls in under age prostitution & military aggression’

Sir Walter Raleigh

‘I think she is the best poet alive’

Virginia Woolf

‘First she starved herself of love which meant also life; then poetry in reference to what her religion demanded…poetry was castrated too’

Gill

‘They (her female characters) have a moral significance because their plights can be read as representative of the pressures and problems women face’

Ashley

‘So wearing is the position of women that annihilation is preferable, since this would enable escape from gender expectations and imposed identities’

Helsinger on Goblin Market

‘The domestic desires of women are examined as dramas of competitive buying and selling in which women are always at risk as an object to be purchased’

‘The female protagonists undo the erasure with which a male market…threatens their existence. The poem becomes a fantasy of consumer power, where the empowered consumer is a woman’

‘Yet Lizzie and Laura triumph over the market only to withdraw from it’

‘Goblin Market is fantasy not because its men are goblins and its consumer goods are magical, but because, for once, sisterhood intervenes so that women can successfully buy in markets run by merchant men’

Helsinger on Maude Clare

‘Rossetti refuses to place exclusive value on either purity or wronged beauty. Rather, both women are implicated in the morally dubious enterprise of devaluing each other, the more subtle but equally destructive consequence of their participation in a market of sex and marriage’

‘emphasises the insidious effects on female relationships of women’s powerlessness in the competitive marriage market’

Phillips

‘unlike her male painting peers she arguably goes further in sitting the women’s domestic experience outside the domestic environment’

‘Rossetti’s female protagonists are freed from the daily grind of realism’

‘The gaps in her poetry are used to reveal the impossible struggle of female piety against corruption in a Victorian patriarchal world’

Bickley

'Many of her poems express an apocalyptic tone - she looks beyond death to a truth that cannot be articulated’

Williams on Winter my secret

‘the poem can be seen as an intentionally riddling assertion of Rossetti’s decision to be writer rather than a wife and mother’

Bristow

‘In Rossetti’s haunting dreamscapes, the afterlife which she glimpses time and time again seems in may ways rather like the world from which her speakers strive to escape. In such a distant universe there too may be betrayals’

‘The story of Lizzie and Laura presents a distinctive critique of women’s position as consumers within the marketplace’

‘Rossetti demonstrates that women can in fact have power as consumers and they can spend their money how and when they wish’

Leighton

‘If ‘Goblin Market’ is a feminised myth of Christian redemption, it is redemption through a willed confusion of fallen and unfallen’'

‘They (the goblins) thus echo the uncannily commodity morality of the 19th century myths of sexuality. Moral downfall is linked to market exchange’'

‘It is precisely through this shared fall, this transgression of the rule of difference, that sisterhood becomes a match for brotherhood, and the goblins are beaten at their own tricks’

McGann

‘Most obviously the doctrine (of soul sleep) provides a ground from which Rossetti can both understand and judge her sense of the insufficiency of a mortal existence’

‘its (soul sleep’s) other principal function is to provide Rossetti with a rationale capable of explaining and even justifying her existence in the late Victorian world of getting and spending, which she judged so severely’

Gilbert & Gubar

‘What are we to think when the redeemed Eden into which Lizzie leads Laura turns out to be a heaven of domesticity?’

‘There are no men in the poem other than the unpleasant goblins…Rossetti does then seem to be dreamily positing an effectively matrilineal and matriarchal world’

Avery

“Rossetti’s religion is never simple or unquestioning. Her writings show her constantly interrogating religious ideas and beliefs, often with a degree of tension and anxiety. Certainly, the speakers of Rossetti’s poems repeatedly struggle with religious doubt, frustration and fear.”

“Rossetti’s speakers demonstrate both an awareness of, and resistance to, those social and political expectations which define acceptable roles for women and which potentially leave them powerless’

‘While poems such as ‘From the Antique’ emphasise the ways in which women might be trapped by convention, other poems… reveal a much more complex negotiation of power which enables the women to achieve agency, equality and self-sufficiency.”

Kirby

“Perhaps the most persuasive confirmation of proto-feminist values in Rossetti’s poetry is that her characters are given the agency to make their own decisions. Rossetti lived an often unconventional life within the confines of Victorian mores, and her female characters act as a reflection of her experiences.”

Williams

“Rossetti was more than capable of empathising with the poor and wretched in her own country and often shows a keen awareness of the wider contexts influencing her narratives. Her understanding of female suffering and exploitation in particular was ahead of her time”

Bickley

“Rossetti “ seeks rather to express extreme moods and passions