Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894) 27th April.

Christina Rossetti's reputation as a poet has often see-sawed. Her best-known poem, Goblin Market, was regular exam fodder in my schooldays, but later dropped out of favour. Now she is back in fashion; last November her poem Remembrance was chosen to be read by Judi Dench at the Westminster Abbey service for the British victims of 11 September. At St Mary's, though, she has always been remembered for 'In the bleak mid-winter,' the tune of which, commissioned by Percy Dearmer from Gustav Holst, was first sung here.

Christina's life story is an odd mixture, and not without its secrets still. Though her father was Italian, she was brought up fiercely anti-RC but devoutly Tractarian, while sharing her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Pre-Raphaelite aesthetics. She lost her fiancé James Collinson, another Pre-Raphaelite, when he converted to Rome, and despite speculations that she had a later lover, she lived her whole life as a spinster whose repressed eroticism found a voice in her religious verse. A.S. Byatt's Booker-winning novel, Possession, draws in part on her life, and Byatt's sister, Margaret Drabble, writing before revived interest in Victorian faery lore helped rekindle her reputation, describes her poetry as 'pervaded by a sense of melancholy, verging at times on the morbid.'

Apart from poetry, Rossetti found her natural bent in church work of varied kinds, writing devotional manuals and religious works for adults and children. But a serious illness in 1871 left her a semi-invalid for the last twenty-plus years of her life. Perhaps her greatest misfortune, though, was that she wrote Goblin Market in 1862, and nothing she wrote subsequently rivalled its popularity.

Charles Plouviez