Christina Rossetti and the Bible : Waiting with the Saints

Through theologically-engaged close readings of her poetry and devotional prose, this book explores how Christina Rossetti draws on the Bible and encourages her Victorian readers to respond to its radical message of grace. Structured chronologically, each chapter investigates her participation in the formation of Tractarian theology and details how her interpretative strategies changed over the course of her lifetime. Revealing how her encounter with the biblical text is informed by devotional classics, Christina Rossetti and the Bible highlights the influence of Thomas a' Kempis, John Bunyan, George Herbert and John Donne and describes how Rossetti adapted the teaching of the Ancient and Patristic Fathers and medieval mystics. It also considers the interfaces that are established between her devotional poems and the anthology and periodical pieces alongside which they were published throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century.

“Painstakingly tracing and chronologically reconstructing the composition, publication, and reception histories of Rossetti’s oeuvre from 1847 to 1893, Ludlow successfully illustrates the poet’s attentiveness to diverse audiences, reinstates her importance as an English poet/theologian in the tradition of George Herbert, connects her to later theologians like Simone Weil and Karl Barth, and suggests that her work can be best understood through intratextuality and through a diachronic, not synchronic, view of time.” –Christianity and Literature

“Ludlow’s almost encyclopaedic mastery of the theological and religious intricacies at play, as well as her ability to trace their historical development and their connections to literature, set the book apart from other studies of its kind: not merely providing a contextual framework for understanding the theological basis of Rossetti’s own works, this study illuminates the longer traditions which are themselves at the root of Victorian theological debates, and of the literature shaped by these in turn … this project offers a necessary correction to recent trends in scholarship that represent Rossetti’s approach as ‘startlingly modern’ … her project’s significance as a contribution to the study of Rossetti’s writing and its theological contexts becomes apparent through the many excellent close readings and analyses performed in this book.” –Heather McAlpine, University of the Fraser Valley, Journal of Victorian Culture

“A sophisticated, well-read, and theologically attuned account of Rossetti’s assimilation of the Bible and devotional writing.” –Jane Stabler, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900