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You bet your life

Margaret Walters, 21 April 1988

Oscar and Lucinda 
by Peter Carey.
Faber, 512 pp., £10.95, March 1988, 0 571 14812 3
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The Fifth Child 
by Doris Lessing.
Cape, 131 pp., £9.95, April 1988, 0 224 02553 8
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Eight Months on Ghazzah Street 
by Hilary Mantel.
Viking, 299 pp., £11.95, April 1988, 0 670 82117 9
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... friend, or Lucinda, and suddenly, with his heart-shaped face and red hair and green eyes he’s a Dante GabrielRossetti angel. Usually inarticulate, he has moments of blazing eloquence. At his first meeting with Lucinda, on a ship to Australia, he is swept away by a Pascalian vision: We bet that there is a God. We ...

Back to the Wall

Nicholas Penny, 21 September 1995

In Perfect Harmony: Picture and Frame 1850-1920 
edited by Eva Mendgen.
Reaktion, 278 pp., £45, May 1995, 90 400 9729 1
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... ideal beauty, the artist’s muse, or a terrible vision. The use of such frames made it clear that Rossetti’s Blessed Damozel, Franz von Stuck’s Die Svende, Bastien-Lepage’s Sarah Bernhardt or Leighton’s Bath of Psyche demanded special attention or at least a central position – indeed Bastien-Lepage’s frame is made of steel, which would it itself ...

Snakes and Leeches

Rosemary Hill: The Great Stink, 4 January 2018

One Hot Summer: Dickens, Darwin, Disraeli and the Great Stink of 1858 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Yale, 352 pp., £25, July 2017, 978 0 300 22726 0
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... and Frith was not alone among artists in aspiring to photographic accuracy or, as it seemed to Dante GabrielRossetti, literalism; he complained to William Bell Scott that most of the Academy pictures that year were ‘done in prose’. But this was what the general art-viewing public of the mid-Victorian years ...

Christina and the Sid

Penelope Fitzgerald, 18 March 1982

Christina RossettiA Divided Life 
by Georgina Battiscombe.
Constable, 233 pp., £9.50, May 1981, 0 09 461950 6
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The Golden Veil 
by Paddy Kitchen.
Hamish Hamilton, 286 pp., £7.95, May 1981, 0 241 10584 6
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The Little Holland House Album 
by Edward Burne-Jones and John Christian.
Dalrymple Press, 39 pp., £38, April 1981, 0 9507301 0 6
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... Christina Rossetti wrote ‘If I had words’ and ‘I took my heart in my hand’ and ‘If he would come today, today’ and ‘What would I give for a heart of flesh to warm me through’ and: I bent by my own burden, must Enter my heart of dust. Her poetry she described as ‘a genuine “lyric cry”, and such I will back against all skilled labour ...

Isn’t London hell?

Seamus Perry: Evelyn Waugh, 10 August 2023

Brideshead Revisited 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 480 pp., £16.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58531 3
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Decline and Fall 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 320 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58529 0
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A Handful of Dust 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 336 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58527 6
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Vile Bodies 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 304 pp., £14.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58528 3
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Sword of Honour 
by Evelyn Waugh.
Penguin, 928 pp., £18.99, October 2022, 978 0 241 58532 0
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... animalism and madness’. But only shortly before the novel appeared Waugh had published a life of Dante GabrielRossetti that inhabited a different world altogether. The book conveys the deep romanticism of Rossetti’s best paintings with quite unfeigned reverence: Beata Beatrix, a ...

Gnawed by rats, burnt at Oxford

Claire Tomalin, 10 October 1991

G.H. Lewes: A Life 
by Rosemary Ashton.
Oxford, 369 pp., £25, September 1991, 0 19 812827 4
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... complexion. Her father, Swynfen Jervis, was a country gentleman, a Radical MP and scholar; both Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti knew the family, where their father had also been a tutor. Agnes was the eldest child; she lost her mother young and had two stepmothers. Rossetti, a ...

At the British Museum

Mary Wellesley: ‘Feminine Power’, 22 September 2022

... what Bahrām-Gušnasp would have made of the image.Lilith also fascinated the Pre-Raphaelites. In Dante GabrielRossetti’s Lady Lilith, she is an auburn-haired beauty admiring her image in a mirror, surrounded by roses and poppies. Rossetti wrote a sonnet to accompany the ...

Hug me, kiss me

Penelope Fitzgerald, 6 October 1994

Such Devoted Sisters: An Anthology of Stories 
edited by Shena Mackay.
Virago, 330 pp., £6.99, August 1994, 1 85381 755 4
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When the World Was Steady 
by Claire Messud.
Granta, 270 pp., £14.99, July 1994, 0 14 014099 9
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... doesn’t change, the book isn’t chronologically arranged, and the earliest piece, Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’, comes last of all. Placed there, it seems like a magical explanation of all that goes before. Christina Rossetti herself said that her poem was not to be taken as an allegory. Her ...

Tennyson’s Text

Danny Karlin, 12 November 1987

The Poems of Tennyson 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Longman, 662 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 582 49239 4
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Tennyson’s ‘Maud’: A Definitive Edition 
edited by Susan Shatto.
Athlone, 296 pp., £28, August 1986, 0 485 11294 9
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The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson. Vol.2: 1851-1870 
edited by Cecil Lang and Edgar Shannon.
Oxford, 585 pp., £40, May 1987, 0 19 812691 3
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The New Oxford Book of Victorian Verse 
edited by Christopher Ricks.
Oxford, 654 pp., £15.95, June 1987, 0 19 214154 6
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... printed in full, the others being FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Lewis Carroll’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’. (The list has attracted comment: it is clearly polemical, and reviewers who objected to ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ as lightweight were exposing the very prejudice its inclusion ...

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