Critics' Quotes Rossetti

Bocher: Twice

'Rossetti's love for God always trumps the love of another human.'

Bocher: Twice

'Being a woman in Victorian Britain meant that you wee doubly judged: by both men and God.'

Morden: Souer and Goblin Market

'Beneath the sentiments of compliance in her poetry there is an uterine of resistance, surpassed passion and desperate longing.'

Mold: Winter

'Women were so beholden to men that the only thing they could call their own was something as tangible as a secret.'

Mold: Souer and Goblin market

She 'suggests that erotic fantasy is dangerously enjoyable, ultimately leading to a barren life of sexual fulfilment.'

Gilbet: Maude Clare and Goblin Market

Rossetti was amongst the 'singers of renunciation of her time.'

Gilbet: Antique

'The oppression and the alienation which many Victorian woman might have experienced due to their exclusion from the key systems of power is felt strongly in (Antique) which opes with an unflinching expression of despair.'

Avery: No thank you John

'Within this poem she asserts the woman's right to say 'no' and to claim independence and agency for herself. Certainly, she is not to be bullied only a relationship because a man or societal convention demands it.'

Avery: Good Friday

'Avery states that her views towards women are "far from conservative and often questioning, challenging and potentially subversive."
This supports the idea that in 'Good Friday Rossetti is expressing her views surrounding the position of women in society

Holiday: Up Hill

'Rossetti frames the poem as a question and answer conversation between someone who is journeying through life and someone who has presumably made it through to the after life and has all the answers.'

Phillips:

'Women are constrained by the gender-roles into which a male dominated society has placed them.'

Hillingdon: Goblin Market

'Can be read as an allegory to the Garden of Eden story, as it intertwines themes of sexuality as in Vicotorian times sex was seen as forbidden fruit, particularly for women due to double standards. The 'Angel in the House' was expected to come to a marriage bed as a virgin and to not enjoy sex but to lie back and think of England.'

Pallazo: Shut Out

Rossetti has 'radically rewritten the fall of Eve.'

Avery

'In Rossetti's poems the female figure is depicted as entrapped or confined physically, psychologically or both.'

Shaw

'All illusions about herself are now shattered.'

Harrison: Goblin Market

... it reflects a profound fear of female sexuality and its potential consequences.'

Hill: Goblin Market

'Eucharist as sacrifice and saving meal is clearly at the heart of 'Goblin Market.''

Galt: Goblin Market

The idea of a women as representative of Christ or having Christ-like redemptive qualities in a work of literature is ground-breaking '

Galt: Goblin Market, Maude Clare

'Her poetry is consistently reflective of the patriarchy that can be ruinous to a sister relationship.'

Galt: Goblin Market

'The possibility of Laura as representative of Rossetti and the goblin men as representative of her depression, is completely viable.'