Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti ed. by David A. Kent, P. G. Stanwood

ESC 26, 2000 David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood, eds. Selected Prose of Christina Rossetti. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 404. David A. Kent and P. G. Stanwood have made an invaluable contribution to Christina Rossetti scholarship with this volume. Included in it are complete versions of Maude, Prose & Verse (1850) and Speaking Likenesses (1874), as well as selections from Commonplace, and Other Short Stories (1870), and two brief fictional “sketches” (1882). Selected Prose thus reprints in one volume a large proportion of the poet’s fictional works, which, if reprinted at all, have appeared in scattered collec­ tions. It also includes excerpts from five works of devotional prose: Annus Domini (1874), Seek and Find (1879), Called to be Saints (1881), Letter and Spirit (1883), Time Flies (1885), and The Face of the Deep (1892). Finally, it makes available such little-read texts as Rossetti’s contributions to the Imperial Dictionary of Universal Biography (1857-63) on Leopardi and Petrarch, magazine articles on Dante (1867, 1884), and an af­ fectionate memoir of her brother, “The House of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (1892). The reprinting of these texts and excerpts re­ presenting her poetry in contexts unfamiliar to most readers but crucial to the reading of the poet and her oeuvre makes Christina Georgina Rossetti new to us. As the editors note, following the complete scholarly edi­ tion of her poetry edited by Rebecca Crump and published by Louisana State University Press in 1979, Christina Rossetti “has emerged from comparative critical obscurity in the last two decades of the twentieth century.” I would call it more of an ex­ plosion: it is only the rare undergraduate student in my thirdand fourth-year seminar in Victorian literature who has not al­ ready been introduced to her poetry, especially the perennially popular “Goblin Market.” In 1994 a double issue of Victorian Poetry was devoted to her work, and the list of critical and scholarly studies of Christina Rossetti grows steadily every year. She has indeed emerged — emerged, along with Emily Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as one of the three “canonical” Victorian women poets who now balance Tennyson, Browning, and Arnold in the Victorian literature curriculum. 230 REVIEWS But as Kent and Stanwood also note, “[w]hat remains con­ spicuously absent from readily available printed sources is a selection of her prose works” (1). As a result, critical studies based on or drawing on her prose have been “minimal” (n3, 373). This carefully chosen and beautifully edited selection of the prose works, which should be acquired by every Rossetti student as well as every research library, should change the face of Rossetti scholarship. In contrast with the equally important scholarly edition of Rossetti’s letters edited by Antony H. Har­ rison, this volume makes available Rossetti’s “other” creative literature. Long devalued as either mediocre fiction or pious meditations, it is more properly seen as significantly “other” to her poetry, especially as it manifests the forms taken by her imagination when that form was not exclusively poetic. The prose also demonstrates Rossetti’s status and identity as a professional. Much of the fiction was clearly written as a sort of flyer into other professional waters to test whether she could find a new market with a new form of literary production. The sheer quantity of devotional prose — which has necessitated stringent editorial selection — should remind us that Rossetti, like many other Victorian women, found publishers more open to women’s religious writing because it sold well. And while it conformed to Rossetti’s beliefs about her duties as a Christian, it also provided her with perhaps the least restrictive and most labor-efficient form of writing. Her “devotional prose” could be whatever she wanted it to be — short meditations, passing inspi­ rations, little bursts of poetry, even bits of political commentary. Formal structures for such writing were exceedingly loose and easy. Not only could such work be turned out relatively quickly, but many glittering shards and fragments of poetic imagination that the poet might have edited out of a poem were never swept out of the less carefully ordered devotional prose. Space permits mention of only a few of the revelations to...

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