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green, blue & gilt decorative (spine) cloth hardcover 8vo. (octavo). dustwrapper in protective plastic book jacket cover. vg cond. binding square & tight. covers clean. edges clean. frontis. portrait of Christina Rossetti missing. damp wrinkling to bottom of the b&w plates, otherwise contents free of markings. dustwrapper in fine cond. a little sunfading on the front, not worn or torn or price clipped (no price listed). nice clean copy. no library markings, store stamps, stickers, bookplates, no names, inking, underlining, remainder markings etc~. first edition. first printing (same date on title & copyright pg., no additional printings indicated). xx+459p. 18 glossy b&w illustrations. appendix. notes. selective bibliography. index. biogaphy. english literature. poetry. ~ One of the few great women poets in English literature, Christina Rossetti has until now remained an enigmatic figure. Her love poems have never been satisfactorily explained. Here for the first time they are made intelligible in terms of the poet's personal life. This brilliant and authoritative study is a new departure in the art of biography. A work of sound scholarship, the most solid and detailed study of Christina Rossetti ever made, it is at the same time an intense and absorbing narrative of a remarkable woman's unfulfilled passion for a man unworthy of her and an account of the creative process through which she transmuted that passion into poetry. Leon Edel, quoting Thoreau, has said that poetry 'is a piece of very private history, which unostentatiously lets us into the secret of a man's life'. Although Christina Rossetti's secret life was well guarded for almost a century, she herself revealed it in poem after poem, and yet the clues were neglected. Guided by the poetry, Lona Mosk Packer began by questioning the prevailing assumptions, and after painstaking investigation concluded by discarding many of them. The result is a new theory that clears away the mysteries and uncertainties. Although in this study the events of daily life provide the framework of the narrative, the author's central concern with what Christina's brother and editor, William Rossetti, has called the 'deeper internal currents' of her life, constitutes the originality of this work and sets it apart from the conventional biography. Mrs Packer's style, graceful but sinewy, provides the ideal vehicle for her strange and moving story. She has had access to a vast amount of new and hitherto unpublished material. She is the first of Christina's biographers to work from the seventeen manuscript notebooks containing Christina's poetry and to utilize the great collection of private Rossetti papers on loan to the Bodleian Library. Members of the Rossetti family lent Mrs Packer their private documents, notebooks, diaries, and other materials. In addition she found many more letters and manuscripts in the Bodleian, the British Museum, and other libraries. Besides unpublished letters, the book contains a few poems never before printed and the deleted stanzas of other poems, many of them excised in the collected works because of their personal implications. A selection of unhackneyed illustrations gives additional interest to what William Rossetti called Christina's 'hushed life~drama'.
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