Note 5, Chapter 1 of the author's Christina Rossetti in Context which the University of North Carolina Press published in 1988. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
Apart from McGann, a number of important recent critics do not succumb to the powerful temptation to read Christina Rossetti's poetry exclusively as autobiography. Among the most recent is Joan Rees (Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 152-60, 167-75). Rees usefully but sketchily introduces an approach to Christina Rossetti's poetry in terms of the Dantean and the sonnet traditions. Gisela Hönnighausen studies religious traditions of flower imagery behind Rossetti's verse ("Emblematic Tendencies"), and Winston Weathers eschews the psychobiographical approach, insisting that Christina Rossetti was able to transcend the "simply [201/202] autobiographical and environmental" elements in her work ("Christina Rossetti"). See also Blake, Love and the Woman Question; Wenger, "Influence of the Bible"; Gilbert and Gubar, Madwoman in the Attic; Kent, "Sequence and Meaning" and "'By thought word and deed'"; D'Amico, "Christina Rossetti" and "Reading and Rereading"; Shaw, "Projection and Empathy"; Connor, "Speaking Likenesses"; Homans, "'Syllables of Velvet'"; and Mermin, "Heroic Sisterhood."
Last modified 24 June 2007