Christina Rossetti was born in 38 Charlotte Street (now 110 Hallam Street), London, to Gabriele Rossetti, a poet and a political exile from Vasto, Abruzzo, Italy, since 1824, and Frances Polidori, the sister of Lord Byron's friend and physician John William Polidori.

[1] She had two brothers and a sister: Dante Gabriel became an influential artist and poet, and William Michael and Maria both became writers.

[2][3][4] Rossetti was educated at home by her mother and father through religious works, classics, fairy tales and novels.

[3] The family homes in Bloomsbury at no.38 and later no.50 Charlotte (Hallam) Street (now demolished)[6] were within easy reach of Madame Tussauds, London Zoo and the newly opened Regent's Park, which she visited regularly.

[3][5] In the 1840s, Rossetti's family faced financial troubles due to a deterioration in her father's physical and mental health.

At the time her brother William was working for the Excise Office and Gabriel was at art school, leaving Christina increasingly isolated at home.

In 1847 she began experimenting with verse forms such as sonnets, hymns and ballads, while drawing on narratives from the Bible, folk tales and the lives of saints.

[13][14] She used the pseudonym "Ellen Alleyne" in the literary periodical, The Germ, published by the Pre-Raphaelites from January to April 1850 and edited by her brother William.

For Rossetti, the artist's idealised vision of the model's character begins to overwhelm his work, until "every canvas means/ the one same meaning.

[17] Rossetti's first commercially printed collection, Goblin Market and Other Poems, was published under her own name by Macmillan & Co. in 1862, when she was 31.

[18] Dante Gabriel Rossetti became his sister's collaborator and created much-praised woodcut illustrations to the book which enhanced the effect of the work and emphasised its sensuality.

[19] Goblin Market was widely praised by critics, who placed her as the foremost female poet of the day; sales, however, were disappointing.

[15] The title poem, one of her best known, is ostensibly about two sisters' misadventures with goblins, but critics have seen it in various ways including an allegory of temptation and salvation, a comment on Victorian gender roles and female agency, and a work of erotic desire and social redemption.

[19] Rossetti worked voluntarily in 1859–1870 at the St Mary Magdalene house of charity in Highgate, a refuge for ex-prostitutes.

[20] There are parallels with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in religious themes of temptation, sin and redemption by vicarious suffering.

[23] She opposed slavery in the United States, cruelty to animals in prevalent vivisection, and exploitation of girls in under-age prostitution.

In the years just before her death, she wrote The Face of the Deep, (1892) a book of devotional prose, and oversaw an enlarged edition of Sing-Song, originally published in 1872, in 1893.

Christina Rossetti died in great pain and anguish of cancer on 29 December 1893 and was buried on 2 January 1894 in the family grave on the west side of Highgate Cemetery, which, notoriously had been opened in October 1869 so that Gabriel could retrieve a volume of poems he had buried with his wife.

[29] Rossetti's popularity in her lifetime did not approach that of her contemporary Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but her standing remained strong after her death.

Her popularity faded in the early 20th century in the wake of Modernism, but scholars began to explore Freudian themes in her work, such as religious and sexual repression, reaching for personal, biographical interpretations of her poetry.

57, 1904), Hubert Parry, Hope Squire,[35] Charles Villiers Stanford, and Jack Gibbons (sixteen song settings).

[36][37] In 1918, John Ireland set eight poems from her Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book to music in his song cycle Mother and Child.

She wrote about her brief stay in Frome, which had "an abundance of green slopes and gentle declivities: no boldness or grandeur but plenty of peaceful beauty".