Maude By Christina Rossetti On Sisterhoods And A Woman S Thoughts About Women By Dinah Mulock Craik

"Maude" was written when Christina Rossetti was 19 and examines the heroine's struggle to resist the notion that modesty and domesticity constitute the duties of women. "On Sisterhoods" by Dinah Mulock Craik advocates the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods.

Showalter's thoughtful, detailed introductory essay is a comprehensive analysis between Rosetti's novella and Craik's essays...the biographical portrait of Christina Rossetti's conflicts makes her a vivid example of the psychological and social barriers to the development of the female poets...her description of Dinah Mulock Craik stressed this woman's common-sense approach to ameliorating the position of the working-class woman in society...useful to students of feminist theory and of Victorian literature. —Academic Library Book Review Cristina Rossetti was nineteen years old when she wrote Maude: Prose and Verse in 1850. Clearly autobiographical, the novel examines the heroine's endeavor to resist the notion that modesty, virtue and domesticity constitute the sole duties of womanhood. For the precocious young poet, the work was only one of several projects of her teens. Growing up in London as the youngest child in a gifted and unusual family of artists and writers, Rossetti had early developed a poetic vocation. But by the time she wrote Maude, the lively, passionate, and adventurous little girl who had hated needlework, delighted in fiercely competitive games of chess, and explored the country with her brothers became a painfully constrained, sickly, and over-scrupulous teenager. Maude makes clear that at least some of Rossetti's affliction came from anxieties about poetic achievement, her wishes both to be admired for her genius and to renounce it as unfeminine. Often overshadowed by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina struggled to express her own independent authorial voice, and to resist a life bound by the constraints and demands of the traditional female role. Other late Victorian attitudes towards Anglican women's communities are brought out in On Sisterhoods by Dinah Mulock Craik which appeared in Longman's magazine in 1883. Craik herself worked on the literary border between feminine gentility and feminist rebellion. In 1850, when Christina Rossetti was writing Maude within the confines of her family, Dinah Mulock was supporting herself and her two younger brothers by her pen. On Sisterhoods confronts head-on `the woman question.' Asserting that women's role is to find beauty in their lives through altruism and good works--to be more or less `good women'--Craik provides a radical solution to the `woman question' by advocating the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods, effectively women's co-operatives. For her, the strongest argument for such a sisterhood is the alternative life it offers to single women, with no outlets for their maternal emotions. The third text presented here, Craik's A Woman's Thoughts About Women, was a widely circulated manual of advice on female self-sufficiency for unmarried women, based on her own experience in a family left destitute by an eccentric father when she was nineteen. It addressed a pressing contemporary problem: the large number of urban single women who were well educated and qualified but for whom traditional employment offered no place. Craik understood that independence would come hard to middle-class women, yet she was optimistic about the ways women might re-educate themselves, abandoning false pride and learning to manage small businesses or conduct trades. Throughout her career, Craik masked her private feminist views with disdain for women's rights and criticism of women's public activism. Unmarried and self-supporting until the age of forty, she wrote about the problems of single and working women in over fifty popular novels, children's stories and collections of essays.

There has been a huge revival of interest in Victorian women's poetry in the last ten years, and it has led to a major reconfiguration of the English poetic landscape of the nineteenth century. This title offers a key selection of poems by 13 Victorian women poets from Christina Rosetti and Felicia Hemans to the witty, iconoclastic May Kendall. The book starts with a substantial general Introduction which places the work of the poets into a context both historical (that of the poems' production) and modern (that of their past and present reception). Each poet's work is introduced by an expansive headnote which tells the story of her life and writing career. The poems all have full explanatory notes to help readers unfamiliar with the period. A Bibliography lists general sources as well as useful further readings. Written in an engaging and accessible manner, the extensive annotations throughout Victorian Women Poets ensure that this fascinating poetry is enjoyable for undergraduate and non-specialist readers.

"Maude" was written when Christina Rossetti was 19 and examines the heroine's struggle to resist the notion that modesty and domesticity constitute the duties of women. "On Sisterhoods" by Dinah Mulock Craik advocates the encouragement of Anglican sisterhoods.

Working at the intersections of feminist literary criticism, new historicism, and narratology, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing revises current understandings of nineteenth-century representations of prostitution, female sexuality and the 'rights of woman' debate. Eberle's project explores the connections and disjunctures between women writing during the Romantic period and those working throughout the Victorian era. She considers a wide range of authors including Mary Wollstonecraft, Amelia Opie, Mary Hays, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Sarah Grand.

Christina Rossetti (1830-94) is regarded is one of the greatest Christian poets to write in English. While Rossetti has firmly secured her place in the canon, her religious poetry was for a long time either overlooked or considered evidence of a melancholic disposition burdened by faith. Recent scholarship has redressed reductive readings of Christian theology as repressive by rethinking it as a form of compassionate politics. This shift has enabled new readings of Rossetti's work, not simply as a body of significant nineteenth-century devotional literature, but also as a marker of religion's relevance to modern concerns through its reflections on science and materialism, as well as spirituality and mysticism. Emma Mason offers a compelling study of Christina Rossetti, arguing that her poetry, diaries, letters, and devotional commentaries are engaged with both contemporary theological debate and an emergent ecological agenda. In chapters on the Catholic Revival, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, contemporary debates on plant and animal being, and the relationship between grace and apocalypse, Mason reads Rossetti's theology as an argument for spiritual materialism and ecological transformation. She ultimately suggests that Rossetti's life and work captures the experience of faith as one of loving intimacy with the minutiae of creation, a divine body in which all things, material and immaterial, human and nonhuman, divine and embodied, are interconnected.

In an unprecedented comparison of two of the most important female authors of the nineteenth century, Azelina Flint foregrounds the influence of the religious communities that shaped Louisa May Alcott’s and Christina Rossetti’s visions of female creativity. In the early stages of the authors’ careers, their artistic developments were associated with their patrilineal connections to two artistic movements that shaped the course of American and British history: the Transcendentalists and Pre-Raphaelites. Flint uncovers the authors’ rejections of the individualistic outlooks of these movements, demonstrating that Alcott and Rossetti affiliated themselves with their mothers and sisters’ religious faith. Applying the methodological framework of women’s mysticism, Flint reveals that Alcott’s and Rossetti’s religious beliefs were shaped by the devotional practices and life-writing texts of their matrilineal communities. Here, the authors’ iconic portrayals of female artists are examined in light of the examples of their mothers and sisters for the first time. Flint recovers a number of unpublished life-writings, including commonplace albums and juvenile newspapers, introducing readers to early versions of the authors’ iconic works. These recovered texts indicate that Alcott and Rossetti portrayed the female artist as a mouthpiece for a wider community of women committed to social justice and divine communion. By drawing attention to the parallels in the authors’ familial affiliations and religious beliefs, Flint recuperates a tradition of nineteenth-century women’s mysticism that departs from the individualistic models of male literary traditions to locate female empowerment in gynocentric relationships dedicated to achieving a shared revelation of God.

1994 marked the centenary of the deaths of Walter Pater, Christina Rossetti and Robert Louis Stevenson, and Beauty and the Beast is largely devoted to an exploration of aspects of their lives and their writings, and the role they played in the development of British literature. Both individually and as a group, these writers offer interesting opportunities to investigate a distinctive ambivalence in the literature of the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Thus we may observe how Pater as the founder of Aestheticism in British literature addressed the Victorian dilemma how to live in Marius the Epicurean; how Rossetti's poetry expresses both spiritual and erotic tendencies, while Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is perhaps the epitome of the fin-de-siècle tension between good and evil, beauty and beast. Yet the scope of this book also includes an examination of the relationships between these three authors and their contemporaries, and of their setting, on the British Isles as well as on the Continent. Thus George Moore makes his appearance, next to Anton Chekhov, Arthur Schnitzler, Oscar Wilde, Alain Fournier and Louis Couperus. The various discussions of these French, German, Russian, Italian, Irish and Dutch connections in this book reflect the international setting of the European fin-de-siècle as a background against which the theme of Beauty and the Beast is discussed. Contributors are: Wim Tigges, C.C. Barfoot, Jan Marsh, Valeria Tinkler-Villani, Amanda Gilroy, Peter van de Kamp, Billie Andrew Inman, Laurel Brake, Peter Costello, Ans Kabel, Douglas S. Mack, Tim Youngs, Neil Cornwell, Sjef Houppermans, Jacques B.H. Alblas, John Stokes, Susan de Sola Rodstein.