The Dove Upon Her Branch: A Novel Portrait of Christina Rossetti
The Rossettis were a truly remarkable family. As Anglo-Italians they stood out among the English Victorians with whom they lived. Arriving from their native land as political exiles, they were literary and artistic, and associated with avant-garde and Romantic rebel figures such as Byron and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of painters. They were obsessed with love, death, and religion, and they sometimes buried their poetry with their deceased wives and allowed live wombats on their dinner tables.
Still famous today are the rambunctious poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his sister Christina (1830-1894), whose poetry and prose has been rediscovered and praised since the rise of feminist criticism in the 1970s, and who is the subject of Denton’s new biographical novel.
Christina’s life was much more staid than her brother’s. A staunch Anglo-Catholic, she never married, and the bulk of her work is devotional. Denton’s novel carries her from childhood to early old age, weaving snippets of her poetry into the prose text, but generally without the verse divisions, as though it were Christina’s thoughts—which of course it is.
The novel is diligently researched (perhaps based on Christina’s many letters) but poorly proofread (Shelley is repeatedly misspelled “Shelly”). It moves a bit like a long letter, occasionally meandering and full of quotidian details. The lurid events of the Rossetti saga—tragic lovers, suicides, religious crises, wombats—are so thoroughly cushioned by formal sentences and accounts of train trips that they lose some of their inherent drama.
What is accentuated is Christina’s sad, morbid, death-centered mentality. “Melancholy helps me find my joy,” she said, and her best work melds the two, as do the best moments of Denton’s novel.
