Learning Not To Be First

Christina was the youngest of the four Rossetti children, born in England to Italian parents. Although she and her brother, the artist Dante Gabriel, were known as the 'two storms', Christina's passionate nature was curbed in a way that her brother's was not, as she submitted to the social and religious pressures that lay so heavily on Victorian women. Kathleen Jones looks at Christina’s life alongside that of other nineteenth-century women writers – notably Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson.