Christina Rossetti was one of the foremost and appealing poets of the Victorian Age. She was born in 1830 in London to a family of esteemed writers, artists, and scholars: her father and sister both Dante scholars, her brother a famous pre-Raphaelite painter and poet, and her other brother an art and literary critic, editor, and memoirist. Growing up among such a close-knit, gifted family, she learned to write poetry from a very young age and when she was seventeen, her grandfather published a private book of her poetry.
Incredibly devoted to the Anglo-Catholic (Tractarian) church influenced both her life (she was politically active and volunteered in a penitentiary), as well as her writing. She wrote about major religious themes like redemption, renunciation, the perfection of divine love, the imperfection of human love, the individual’s unworthiness in the eyes of God, and the tension between vanity and hope. Her poems were often devotional inquiries or self-reflections before God—à la George Herbert, the great 17th century metaphysical poet. Writing more often than not in the lyrical first person, she never gives us the sense that she is speaking only of her own life. Some have questioned her despairing tone, her obsession with death and hopelessness as recurrent motifs, while others have praised her complexity. She often wrote figuratively from the perspective of ghosts and often characterizes her narrators the subtle moments after death in a kind of “soul-sleep,” a metaphysical idea she took from her contemporary William Dodsworth. (Interestingly, another contemporary, Emily Dickinson, also wrote many poems of the self’s awareness after death, and it is claimed that Rossetti had read some Dickinson). 
Rossetti also wrote for children, including a book of nursery rhymes inspired by William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, and she even befriended Lewis Carroll at one time. Regarding her most renowned poem, Goblin Market, Rossetti is quoted as having said at different points in her lifetime, that the poem both is and isn’t “a poem for children.”
While some have claimed Rossetti’s poetry is too simplistic, there is a deeper unseen layer to her work. Furthermore, it is poignant that while she was writing about vanity and an inherent contradiction of hope, the seeds were being sown for the advent of literary Modernism a few decades later. When you place Rossetti’s work alongside such later writers as T.S. Eliot or Wallace Stevens, there is little doubt that this incisive Victorian poet believed, through her work and devotion, of some redemption and some hope after life.
Rossetti died on December 28, 1894 and was buried on New Year’s Day 1895.