Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Author(s): Marjorie Stone

Source: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 32, No. 3/4, Centennial of Christina Rossetti: 1830-1894
(Autumn - Winter, 1994), pp. 339-364
Published by: West Virginia University Press
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Sisters in Art: Christina Rossetti
and Elizabeth Barrett Browning
MARJORIESTONE
SISTERS CAN BE WICKED TO EACH OTHER, WE NEED NOT READ
Christina Rossetti to know. Yet the poet who concluded her most
famous work with the moral, "'there is no friend like a sister . . . To
fetch one if one goes astray'" (Goblin Market, 11.562-565, Crump, Po-
ems, 1:26), does provide particularly penetrating depictions of sisterly
malice:
Who told my mother of my shame?
Who told my father of my dear?
Oh who but Maude, my sister Maude,
Who lurked to spy and peer.
"Sister Maude," the poem in which these lines appear (11. 1-4), was
published in the same volume as Goblin Market. However, it con-
cludes not with a comforting moral about sisterly devotion, but with a
curse: "sister Maude, oh sister Maude, / Bide you with death and sin"
(11. 21-22). In this instance, the sister who is shamed by a guilty love
is given the last word. But in "Noble Sisters," appearing earlier in the
same volume, the meddling or the righteous sister (depending on
which way the reader's sympathies run) closes the poem with her
curse:
"Go seek in sorrow, sister,
And find in sorrow too:
If thus you shame our father's name
My curse go forth with you." (11. 57-60)
These two poems of sisterly strife thus create an unsettling dialogical
counterpoint, even though Rossetti's sequencing does not suggest a
direct connection between them. Together with Goblin Market, the
opening work in Rossetti's 1862 volume, "Sister Maude" and "Noble
Sisters" present a triptych of sisterly relationships that are in each
case destabilized by the energy of desire and a masculine third pres-
ence. The triptych, in other words, is itself composed of triadic
configurations of disruptive desire and conflict.
In the case of Goblin Market, this disruptive desire appears to be
resolved in a plot where, as Linda E. Marshall suggests, one sister acts
as a heroically self-sacrificing "mother-Christ" to the other, thereby

339

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340/ VICTORIAN POETRY

producing not only a redeemed version of the sisterly dyad but also a
redemptive vision of female genealogies collectively. Reading this sis-
terly "communion" in light of Luce Irigaray's evocation of a "sensible
transcendental" discourse realizable through the "bodily encounter"
with the mother (le corps-a-corpsavec la mere), Marshall provides one
of the most persuasive interpretations to date of the central eucharis-
tic encounter in Goblin Market: Lizzie's offering of herself to Laura
with the words, "Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices . . . Eat me, drink
me, love me" (11. 468, 47 1).1 Yet if the climax and the epilogue of
Goblin Market offer a glimpse of the redemptive female genealogies
Irigaray and others have so compellingly evoked, it is a glimpse that
cannot be sustained without interruption in the "old-world thicket"
of a fallen world. The resolution of the sisterly strife in Goblin Market
is undercut not only by the counterpointed sister poems that appear
later in the same volume, but also by the textual indeterminacies of
the poem itself. Like The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Goblin Market
cannot be contained by its moralizing epilogue.
As I hope to show, the destabilizing forces of desire and conflict
that enter into the "sister" poems in Rossetti's Goblin Market volume
can also be discerned in Christina Rossetti's relationship with her
older "sister in art," Elizabeth Barrett Browning. In this case too there
is a a sororal bond that often seems loving and respectful, judging by
Rossetti's direct comments about Barrett Browning and by the strik-
ing parallels between some of their gynocentric emancipatory strate-
gies. But, as Betsy Erkkila points out in The Wicked Sisters, women
writers who form sisterly alliances that seem "wicked" chiefly to the
"systems of masculine power and dominance" they threaten can also
be writers who are "wicked" to each other in struggles that do not
necessarily take place along lines of sexual difference. "The em-
phasis on mutuality, nurturance, and familial bonding among literary
sisters and/or mothers and daughters as the essential form of women's
literary history" has tended to "mask, silence, or write over women's
culture as a site of historical struggle and difference among women
themselves," Erkkila observes, advancing a thesis also perceptively
pursued by Helena Michie in Sororophobia.2Erkkila does not address
Rossetti's relationship with Barrett Browning. But the conflicts she
discerns in Emily Dickinson's response to her most powerful female
precursor are also apparent in the numerous echoes and, in some
cases, explicit allusions linking Rossetti's poems to Barrett
Browning's. In the fullest treatment of these textual affiliations to
date, Antony H. Harrison rightly emphasizes the "revisionist" ele-
ments in Rossetti's appropriations of her precursor's work, and notes,

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 MARJORIESTONE /341

much as Erkkila does, how "earlyfeminism's totalizing tendencies"

have led to a neglect of importantdifferencesamong the "ideological
subcultures"women writersparticipatein.3
Although Harrisonsuggeststhat BarrettBrowningwas "a literary
mother"for Rossetti (p. 112), I have chosen to approachthe two as
sisters for several reasons. First, Rossetti's serious aspirations as a
writer began in her adolescence during the 1840s, at a time when
Barrett Browning's1844 Poemshad recently established their author
as England'sleading woman poet. Since BarrettBrowningdid not die
until 186 1, her careeroverlapssubstantiallywith the first intense de-
cade of Rossetti's writing career. During this period, when Barrett
Browning and Rossetti wrote as contemporaries,and when Rossetti
wrote many of the poems she is best known for today, their relative
positions as poets seem more akin to the positions of sisters some
years apart than to those of a mother and a daughter.More impor-
tantly, the signs of conflict in the echoes connecting Rossetti'spoetry
to BarrettBrowning'sare congruentwith Rossetti'srepresentationsof
sisters, but not with her representations of mothers and of the
mother-daughterbond. Rossetti's depictions of the mother-daughter
relationship and of mothers themselves are almost alwayspositive, as
one might expect from a woman who, in Virginia Sickbert's words,
had "adeep and life-long attachment"to the mother whom she "dedi-
cated all but one of her books to."4(By way of contrast, Rossetti dedi-
cated GoblinMarketto her sister Maria in manuscript,but chose to
delete the dedication "ToM.F.R." beforepublication [Crump,Poems,
1:234]). The positive inscriptions of the mother in Rossetti's poetry
differ markedlyfrom BarrettBrowning'smore ambivalentrepresenta-
tions of mothers in AuroraLeighand elsewhere.5Significantly,while
Barrett Browningportraysa dying mother who curses her daughter's
shame in "A Year'sSpinning,"in "Noble Sisters,"a ballad resembling
"A Year'sSpinning"in several respects,Rossetti chooses to present a
cursingsister.6
One cannot conclude, of course, that because Rossetti focuses on
sisterly conflicts in several poems and becauseher poems also register
conflicts with Barrett Browning, she therefore approached Barrett
Browningas a sister rather than a mother figure.But as I suggest be-
low, there is reason to believe that this correlation may in fact be a
significantone, given that the poem in which Rossetti's indebtedness
to and rivalrywith BarrettBrowningseems to be strongest is a poem
about the subtle strife between an older and a youngersister. A final
reason for approachingthe two writersas sisters is that their poetical
relationship is characterizedby a triadic configurationof desire and

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342/ VICTORIANPOETRY

conflict very similar to the configuration that recurs in Rossetti's

sister poems. Just as the conflicts that divide the sisters in these po-
ems are associated with the presence of a masculine third party, so
too, in the relation between Rossetti and BarrettBrowning,the con-
flicts and tensions that emerge are typically linked to a masculine
presence that intensifiesand/ordestabilizesthe sororalconnection. In
his role as Christina'sbrotherin art, mentor and muse, Dante Gabriel
Rossetti often acts as this intermediaryor intervening masculinepres-
ence in the poetical relationshipof BarrettBrowningand his younger
sister, both because his early enthusiasmfor BarrettBrowning's1844
Poemshelped to establish her as Christina'spreeminent female rival,
and because he later expressed strong objections to the "taint" of
BarrettBrowning's"falsettomuscularity"in certain of his sister's po-
ems. However, given Christina Rossetti's fervent and increasingly
fixed Anglican faith, her brother is never so importanta muse figure
for her as is God. God, in the incarnation of a loving Christ, is the
"Bridegroom"she suffers for, serves, and hastens to meet in poem
after poem. In Rossetti's later devotional poetry, where her subtle
resistanceto BarrettBrowningis more emphaticallyregistered,Christ
is therefore the masculine presence that divides Rossetti from her
sister in art.
Whether this division between two preeminent nineteenth-cen-
tury sisters in art is seen as positive or negative in its consequences
depends in the first instance on how one views Dante Gabriel'sinflu-
ence on Christina Rossetti's poetry as opposed to BarrettBrowning's
influence, and in the second on how one interprets the effects of
Rossetti's devotional ideology on her artistic vision. Critics have tra-
ditionally assumedthat her brother's"revisinghand" played an im-
portantrole in helping Christinato refineher craft to a greaterexcel-
lence of finish than BarrrettBrowningever achieved, and certainly it
seems true that Dante Gabriel'sdetailed comments on his sister's po-
ems helped her to realize an impressive"poetics of 'conciseness,'"to
use Harrison'sphrase:that is, her brother'scriticisms frequently led
Rossetti to delete stanzas,or cut poems short.7In contrast, my exami-
nation of the revisions in Barrett Browning'spublished and unpub-
lished ballads, lyrics, and dramaticmonologuesindicates that she of-
ten adds sections to her poems- though the result is not a poetics of
diffuseness, but a poetics of ramifyingcomplexity, like that articu-
lated in Ruskin'saesthetic of the "Gothic."8Despite Dante Gabriel's
positive contributions to his sister's "poetics of conciseness," how-
ever, I will suggest below that he may have limited her range as a
poet by discouraging her publication of poems radically critiquing

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 MARJORIESTONE /343

Victorian gender ideologies: ventures encouraged by Barrett

Browning's example. As for the effects of Rossetti's devotional ideol-
ogy on her art, Harrison and Jerome J. McGann have persuasively ar-
gued that Rossetti's devotional ideology is profoundly subversive in
its textual enactments because it radically distanced Rossetti from the
historical contexts she critiques (Harrison, CR, p. 159; McGann,
Kent, p. 11). But Anglican theology and the Tractarianism that en-
riched and renewed it in the the nineteenth century were, for
Rossetti, a primary cultural context, not ideologies that permitted her
to transcend her cultural context. Diane D'Amico's analysis of
Rossetti's representations of Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene suggests
that the more subversive dimensions of Rossetti's theological and po-
etic vision emerge when she subtly questions the androcentric devo-
tional ideologies she otherwise embraced (Kent, pp. 175-191).
Rossetti found important precedents for such questioning and for
many innovative poetic practices and perspectives in Barrett
Browning's poetry. At the same time, she found much that her own
poetic ambitions, aesthetic principles, and religious beliefs led her to
question in the work of her older poetical sister and rival. A combi-
nation of affinities in textual practices and divergence in aesthetic
and religious vision is apparent in the poems I will consider in this es-
say, as well as in other important textual connections that form a sub-
ject in their own right, most notably those linking Rossetti's repre-
sentations of Eve to A Drama of Exile. Of this latter set of connec-
tions, suffice it to say here that echoes in a number of poems, includ-
ing "Bird or Beast?," "Eve," and Goblin Market, indicate that Rossetti
drew repeatedly on the groundbreaking gynocentric representation of
Eve in A Drama of Exile. As a result, like Barrett Browning, Rossetti
significantly contributes to a tradition of revisionary mythmaking ex-
emplified in the Renaissance by Amelia Lanier's apology for Eve and,
in our own time, by contemporary women poets such as Judith Wright
and Susan Donnelly. Nevertheless, Rossetti's refashioning of Barrett
Browning's Eve also reflects her strong resistance to some of the less
orthodox elements in A Drama of Exile, in particular, the elements
linking it to Byron's Cain.
The three Rossetti poems that I will be most immediately con-
cerned with here, "Three Nuns," "L.E.L.," and "The Lowest Room,"
engage with Barrett Browning's works in a similarly complex way. All
of these poems concern sisters of one sort or another: religious sisters,
literary sisters, and the fictitious sisters that literary sisters create. All
three of these sister poems also exhibit strong and, in two cases, ex-
plicit connections with Barrett Browning and/or specific poems by

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344/ VICTORIANPOETRY

her. Among these, "The Lowest Room"presents a particularlycom-

plex case of the spirit of intimacy and rivalry between sisters in art,
given that Rossetti here portraysthe conflict between two unnamed
sisters in a poem that not only reflects a keen anxiety of belatedness
but also teems with echoes of Barrett Browning's works- among
them, echoes of "Berthain the Lane,"a poem that itself focuses on
the muted but intense conflicts between two sisters.
Not coincidentally, "The Lowest Room" is the poem by Rossetti
that her brother most vigorously objected to because of its Barrett
Browning "taint." By analyzing the likely sources of this "taint" in
some detail, I hope to show that, although Dante Rossetti'sresistance
to BarrettBrowning's"wicked"female subversivenessmay have con-
strained his sister's artistic and publication practices, his objections
to Barrett Browning were ultimately less important than Christina
Rossetti's religious objections and poetic ambitions. Insofar as "The
Lowest Room"strikingly anticipates GoblinMarketin its representa-
tion of two sisters yet refuses to resolve the differences that divide
them, it points to the complex etiology of sisterly strife elided in the
fairy-tale epilogue of the later work. The conflicts pervading
Rossetti's relationship with BarrettBrowningreflect a similarlycom-
plex etiology.
In the context of these conflicts, and in the largercultural con-
text of the critical reaction against the audaciouslygynocentric au-
thor of AuroraLeighafter her death,9the high admirationRossetti ex-
pressed in her later years for Barrett Browning is especially signifi-
cant. In 1883, when she was approachedby John Ingramto write a
volume on Elizabeth Barrett Browning in his "EminentWomen Se-
ries,"she replied, "I should write with enthusiasmof that great poet-
ess and (I believe) lovable woman, whom I was never, however, so
fortunateas to meet."Eight yearslater, when critics were increasingly
advancing the claim that Rossetti herself was a more accomplished
artist than her greatestfemale precursor,she doubtedto the contrary,
"whetherthe woman is born, or for many a long day, if ever, will be
born, who will balance not to say outweigh Mrs. Browning"(Bell,
pp. 101, 103).10However, the "weight"of BarrettBrowning'sachieve-
ment was not without its burdenfor Rossetti at an earlierpoint in her
own career. In 1870, after a request from a publisherfor some poems
with a social purpose,Rossetti observedto her brother, "It is impos-
sible to go on singing out-loud to one's one-stringedlyre. It is not in
me, and therefore it will never come out of me, to turn to politics or
philanthropy with Mrs. Browning:such many-sidednessI leave to a
greaterthan I, and, having said my say, may well sit silent. ... At the

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 MARJORIESTONE /345

worst, I suppose a few posthumous groans may be found amongst my

remains" (CGRFL, p. 31). The self-depreciation in this statement is
so exaggerated as to be clearly parodic, like Emily Dickinson's famous
lie to Thomas Wentworth Higginson in her annus mirabilis, 1862, that
she had written no poetry to speak of. But clearly Barrett Browning's
many-stringed lyre presented a formidable precedent to Rossetti - all
the more so, perhaps, because her brother Dante Gabriel seems to
have prodded her to produce some work of epic scope (Rossetti Papers,
p. 89).
This she never undertook to do, but she did learn from and adapt
Barrett Browning's innovations in a range of poetic modes. She also
expressed her credo as a writer in strikingly similar terms- though,
characteristically with some strategic revisions. As Harrison points
out, Barrett Browning's bold claims for the woman writer's vocation
in Aurora Leigh are anticipated in Rossetti's quietly assertive presen-
tation of herself in 1854 to William Edmondstoune Aytoun, an editor
of Blackwood's: "My love for what is good in the works of others
teaches one that there is something above the despicable in mine;
that poetry is with me, not a mechanism, but an impulse and a reality;
and that I know my aims in writing to be pure, and directed to that
which is true and right."11 But if this statement anticipates Aurora
Leigh, it also seems to echo Barrett Browning's "Preface" to her 1844
Poems: "While my poems are full of faults, . . . they have my heart and
life in them, - they are not empty shells. . . . Poetry has been as seri-
ous a thing to me as life itself; ... I never mistook pleasure for the
final cause of poetry; ... I have done my work . . . not as mere hand
and head work, apart from the personal being, - but as the com-
pletest expression of that being to which I could attain" (CW, 2:148-
149). Some of the essential differences between Rossetti and Barrett
Browning also emerge in these statements, of course. Whereas Barrett
Browning articulates an individualist aesthetic of Promethean Ro-
mantic aspiration, striving for the "completest expression" of the be-
ing that she can attain, Rossetti emphasizes the "pure," the "true,"
and the "right," expressing the classical aesthetic that embodies her
acceptance of spiritual and artistic systems of authority.
Rossetti's strong belief in what she saw as "true and right" led her
to engage in subtle struggles with Barrett Browning even at a rela-
tively early point in her career, when her choice of poetic forms and
strategies simultaneously reflects the impact of her precursor's innova-
tions. One of her first explicit allusions to Barrett Browning appears
in the poetic sequence entitled "Three Nuns," included in Maude:
Prose and Verse. Written by 1850 (though not published until 1897),

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346/ VICTORIANPOETRY

Maude is a novella in which the poet protagonist of the title forms

one of a triad of female charactersrepresentingthe differing choices
and fates available to young Victorian women. Harrison aptly de-
scribes "ThreeNuns" as a sequence of "dialogicallyinteracting solilo-
quies" exploring the "rangeof alternative motivations" that might
lead "an impassionedyoung woman to choose the life of the cloister"
(CR, p. 133)- as one of the young women in Maude,Magdalen,actu-
ally does. In the first monologue in the sequence, a young woman op-
pressedby "Presentsorrowand past sin" (1. 37) and haunted by recol-
lections of a dreamlike,childhood state of purity seeks escape behind
the "shadow"of the convent wall. Her one comfort in her immure-
ment is the song of "a solitarybird"(although, revealingly,she is not
able to maintain her focus on it throughouther monologue):
By the gratingof my cell
Sings a solitarybird;
Sweeterthan the vesperbell,
Sweetest song was ever heard.*
Sing upon thy living tree:
Happyechoes answerthee,
Happysongster,sing to me. (Crump,Poems,3:187; 11.15-21).
Rossetti's asterisk referring the reader to the refrain line in
"Catarina to Camoens"- "'Sweetest eyes were even seen.' E. B.
Browning." - creates an intricate pattern of intertextualityin this first
nun's soliloquy. In effect, Rossetti here presents an echo of an echo,
since Barrett Browning'srefrain line is itself taken from the Portu-
guese poet Camoens'famouslove poem paying tribute to the beautiful
eyes of his lady Catarina.Insofaras Rossetti's note calls attention to
her allusion to "E.B. Browning,"it might be taken to reflect an anxi-
ety of influence entirely in keeping with the characterof the acutely
self-conscious Maude, with the insistent echo images here, and with
the pervasive echoes of both Barrett Browning and Tennyson else-
where in Maude's verse.12Most notably, there seems to be another
strong echo of Barrett Browning,this time of "The Romance of the
Swan'sNest," in the importantlyric "Symbols"(Crump,Poems,1:75-
76), which was also included in Maude.13Yet the very explicitness of
Rossetti's allusion in "Three Nuns" indicates a conscious rhetorical
strategyratherthan an uncontrolledanxiety.
In part, Rossetti derived this strategy from the example of
"Catarinato Camoens,"in which BarrettBrowninguses the device of
the echo to insert her poem in an establishedpoetic tradition, which
she then proceeds to deconstruct from within. Camoens' love lyrics
and the romantic story of his Catarina (who died while he was in ex-
ile) were well known in the early nineteenth century, owing in part

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 MARJORIESTONE /347

to translations by Viscount Strangford (Barrett Browning's principal

source) and Felicia Hemans. As Glennis Stephenson notes, however,
Hemans makes no attempt in her translations "to accommodate the
female lyric voice of desire."14Barrett Browning not only makes this
voice her focus in "Catarina," she also subtly critiques the tradition of
male amatory poetry that has silenced it by choosing to represent the
thoughts and feelings behind the famous eyes that Camoens praised,
but did not really see clearly at all. As Barrett Browning's Catarina
pointedly observes of her lover, "you only see me, / In your thoughts
of loving man . . . Through the wavings of my fan" (11. 41-44). Al-
though Dorothy Mermin describes "Catarina to Camoens" as an "al-
most unprecedented" attempt "to find a place for a female voice in
the central tradition of amatory poetry," she tends to be dismissive of
the success of this attempt in her reading of the poem as a "mawkish"
lyric.15But in many respects, "Catarina" is less a simple romantic lyric
than a fully developed dramatic lyric. As such, it is one of many pub-
lished and unpublished experiments by Barrett Browning with vari-
ants on the dramatic monologue form, among them the fine mono-
drama on Aeschylus attributed to her husband until 1982.16
"Three Nuns" can be seen as a similar set of experiments with
dramatic speakers. Indeed, considerable evidence suggests that Barrett
Browning's "Catarina" and other works in the same mode may well
have served as more important models for Rossetti's earlier dramatic
monologues than Robert Browning's 1842 Dramatic Lyrics. The nu-
merous revisions Barrett Browning made in "Catarina" between its
initial composition in 1831, its first publication in the October 1843
edition of Graham's Magazine, and its subsequent publication in the
1844 Poems transform it from a traditional lyric complaint by a dying
semi-exotic speaker into a dramatic poem in which the speaker's set-
ting and situation are fully realized, and her desires, anxieties, and
self-deceptions are ironically represented with psychological insight.
Rossetti clearly recognized the effectiveness of Barrett Browning's
dramatic technique. Several details in Catarina's setting and situation
are echoed in the monologue of Rossetti's first nun: the reference to
the vesper bell, the convent setting described in Stanza Eleven of
"Catarina," the allusion to "earth-noise" (1. in) echoed in Rossetti's
nun's desire to escape the "troublesome / Noise of life" (11.6-7), and
most notably, the image of Death as the lover who is approaching
Catarina to "cover" her with the "screen" of the grave, "shading" the
eyes her lover paid tribute to in song (11.4, 63, 22).
Nevertheless, Rossetti's strategic alterations of the speaker, situa-
tion, and setting in Barrett Browning's "Catarina" are more telling

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348/ VICTORIANPOETRY

than her echoes. In a typical revisionary swerve, her doubled echo in-
troduces a significant variation in its substitution of the holy bird's
"Sweetest song" and its "happy echoes" for the "sweetest eyes" that
Barrett Browning refers to in the echoing refrain of "Catarina." This
substitution underlines what is absent in "Catarina." At one point in
her deathbed reflections, Barrett Browning's Catarina acknowledges
that "the priest waits for the praying" and that "the soul must pass
away in / Strains more solemn-high than these" (11. 115*116). But
these strains are not presented in the poem. Instead, Catarina imag-
ines herself in heaven looking down on her lover as Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's Blessed Damozel does, though she is a damozel who
struggles to hold back her tears of yearning. The parallel is not sur-
prising, given that "The Blessed Damozel" is filled with echoes of
Barrett Browning's 1838 and 1844 volumes.17 As Catarina is tor-
mented by the thought of the rivals who may eclipse her in the eyes
of her lover, she resolves to bless any future woman her lover might
court - should her eyes be "sweeter" than Catarina's own, that is.
(The ending is ironically ambiguous, as much a challenge as a vow.)
Despite this spirit of self-sacrifice, however - which made Catarina a
favorite among nineteenth-century male readers- like the Blessed
Damozel she nevertheless imagines herself in heaven as being still ab-
sorbed by events on earth. In the "Three Nuns" Christina Rossetti
provides the "solemn-high" strains that Catarina (and the Blessed
Damozel) never attain by substituting the nun's focus on the holy
bird's song for Catarina's narcissistic preoccupation with her lover's
song of her own "sweetest eyes." A parallel substitution appears in
Rossetti's use of lines from an Italian nuns' song for epigraphs in her
three soliloquies. Together, both substitutions function to transform
Camoens' originary song of erotic male desire into no more than a
muted subtext.
Similarly, Rossetti's shift from a visual image of a lady's eyes to
the auditory image of a spiritual song displaces the economy of the
male gaze that is replicated in Barrett Browning's "Catarina," even
though she critiques its blindness. Rossetti's rejection of the male
gaze is even more apparent in her nun's opening invocation, which
dissolves the fairy tale "mirror, mirror, on the wall" into the welcom-
ing shadow of the convent wall: "Shadow, shadow on the wall /
Spread thy shelter over me" (11. 1-2). As these lines imply, however,
the first of Rossetti's three nuns is more driven by the desire for es-
cape and withdrawal than union with Christ: in this respect, she re-
mains a little like Barrett Browning's Catarina. A higher spiritual
state is reflected in the third nun's intense focus on Paradise. This

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 MARJORIESTONE /349

nun does not simply strive to listen to a holy bird; her heart is a "free-
born bird" caged in her body that longs to escape to "its own nest" in
Paradise. Moreover, unlike Catarina, who on her deathbed says,
"Come, O lover" (1. 4) as much to Death as to the absent Camoens,
the third nun's final words are addressed to Christ: "'The Spirit and
the Bride say, Come.'"18
Another explicit allusion to Barrett Browning very similar to the
echoing allusion to "Catarina" in "Three Nuns" appears in Rossetti's
poem about Letitia Landon, "L.E.L.,"written in 1859 (Crump, Poems,
1:153-155). As Crump's notes indicate, in the manuscript of the
poem, accompanying its original title "Spring," there is an asterisk
and an accompanying note, "L.E.L. by E.B.B."; while in the 1863 and
1866 published versions, the poem's epigraph, "'Whose heart was
breaking for a little love,'" is followed by "E. B. BROWNING." Like
the double echo of Barrett Browning and Camoens in "Three Nuns,"
this epigraph, which Rossetti uses as the refrain line in the poem
(much as Barrett Browning uses Camoens' famous tribute in her
"Catarina"), functions to link Rossetti to more than one poetic pre-
cursor at once. In this case it connects her, as in a chain letter, to an
entire tradition of poetical sisters, including not only Barrett Brown-
ing, but also Letitia Landon and, indirectly, Felicia Hemans.
Here again, as in "Three Nuns," Rossetti seems to be employing
poetic strategies used by Barrett Browning before her, both in the
latter's elegy for Landon, "L.E.L.'s Last Question" (Works, 3:117-
119), and in an earlier elegy for Hemans, "Felicia Hemans. To L.E.L.,
Referring to Her Monody on the Poetess" (Works, 2:81-83). "L.E.L.'s
Last Question" is evidently the source of Rossetti's epigraph and re-
frain line. But the layered intertextuality of "L.E.L."also exhibits in-
teresting parallels with the elegy Barrett Browning wrote for Hemans
and addressed to Landon. Rightly celebrated by Victorian critics for
its mellifluous flowing verse, "Felicia Hemans. To L.E.L." is a particu-
larly artful reflection of connections and rivalries among literary sis-
ters in that Barrett Browning here links herself to her two most suc-
cessful female precursors, while elegizing one (Hemans) and subtly
criticizing and challenging the other (Landon). "Thou bay-crowned
living One that o'er the bay-crowned Dead art bowing," Barrett
Browning begins, focusing on the coveted crown of laurels and imply-
ing its transmission from the dead Hemans to Landon, who was alive
and at the height of her fame in 1835 when this poem first appeared
in the September issue of the New Monthly Magazine. Echoing
Landon's "monody" for Hemans in repeated quotations, Barrett
Browning also indirectly rebukes her living rival, telling her to "re-

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350/ VICTORIANPOETRY

serve [her] tears for living brows where all such tears are meeter"
(1. 6), and criticizing her tribute of flowers:"bringnot near the sol-
emn corse a type of human seeming, / Lay only dust's stern verity
upon the dust undreaming"(11.13-14). This criticism is even more
pointed in the 1838 version of the poem, which Rossetti may well
have been familiar with, than in the 1850 version. Whereas in the
1850 version, BarrettBrowningtells Landon to "takemusic from the
silent Dead whose meaning is completer"(1. 5), in the 1838 version,
she writes: "Go! take thy music from the dead, / Whose silentness is
sweeter!" The tactful alteration (clearly indicated in the printer's
copy for the 1850 Poemsnow at Wellesley College Library)masksbut
does not otherwise greatlyreduce the severity of the critique.19In the
context of this critique, particularlyas initially expressed,the conclu-
sion of the poem can be read as both an advance elegy for Landon
and a challenge: "Be happy, crownedand living One! and as thy dust
decayeth / May thine own Englandsay for thee what now for Her it
sayeth"(11.29-30).
A similarlycomplex mixture of tribute and rivalry may, perhaps,
be reflected in Rossetti's invocation of "E.B.B." in her poem to
"L.E.L."That is, like Barrett Browning,who subtly usurpsLandon's
place as chief mournerin her elegy for Hemans, Rossetti may be in-
voking "E.B.B."while she simultaneouslypresentsherself as Landon's
chief successor,not as the successorof a successor.Such a readingof
"L.E.L."might help to account for the suppression,after 1866, of the
reference to "E. B. Browning"following the epigraph.However, it is
also possible that the deletion may have been caused by Rossetti's
recognition that the line she uses as her epigraphis not an exact quo-
tation: in "L.E.L.'s Last Question," Barrett Browning describes
Landon as "one thirsty for a little love" (1. 39), but the line "Whose
heart was breakingfor a little love" does not appear.20Since Rossetti
uses her epigraphas the echoing refrain line in her poem (using an
artfully varied refrain much as Barrett Browning often uses it), she
could not simplyhave altered the epigraphwithout altering the effect
of her poem. Alternatively, given Rossetti's reference to the "happy"
love life of Barrett Browningin the "Preface"to Monna Innominata,
she may have suppressedthe mention of "E. B. Browning"because,
without a footnote explaining her epigraph's context, the line
"Whoseheart was breakingfor a little love" would have clashed with
the the image of BarrettBrowning'shappy marriedlife that increas-
ingly prevailed after her death in 1861. Whatever muted rivalry the
deletion of "E. B. Browning's"name in "L.E.L."may reflect, the ini-
tial explicit allusion does not itself seem to involve a pointed critique

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 MAR]ORIE STONE /351

like that found in the revision of the refrain line from "Catarina" in
"Three Nuns," or in Barrett Browning's address to Landon in "Felicia
Hemans. To L.E.L." On the contrary, Rossetti's contrast between the
public and private life of the woman artist in "L.E.L." is very similar
to Barrett Browning's representation of these divisions in the life of
Aurora Leigh.21
More importantly, the allusion to "E. B. Browning" in "L.E.L."
helps to foreground a broader set of parallels between certain poetical
modes that Rossetti made consummately her own and a significant
body of poems by Barrett Browning that tends to be little read today.
Dolores Rosenblum has persuasively argued that Rossetti's poetics
embodies an "aesthetic of renunciation" shared by other nineteenth'
century women poets, in its focus on "unfulfilled desire, loss, and self-
sacrifice," sometimes leading to the "apocalyptic reversal" of a heav-
enly consummation of desire (Rosenblum, p. 15). The inner division
this aesthetic produces is mirrored in the intensely dialogic form of
Rossetti's lyrics, a feature that Harrison has emphasized (CR, p. 15),
and in the patterns of counterpoint created by Rossetti's artful poetic
sequencing.22 The aesthetic of renunciation, the focus on loss and un-
fulfilled desire, and the use of dialogic form to convey inner division
and spiritual debate are apparent in many works by Barrett Browning
too. For example, "That Day," "Loved Once," "A Dead Rose," and
"Change Upon Change" in Barrett Browning's 1844 and 1850 Poems
are Rossetti-like dramatic lyrics about loss and betrayal in love
(Works, 3:106-108; 202-204; 210-21 1). "The Mask" (Works, 3:190-
191) is a haunting dramatic lyric exploring exactly the division be-
tween public role and private anguish that Rossetti treats in "L.E.L."
"Calls on the Heart" (Works, 3:192-195) and "Confessions" (Works,
3:182-186) in Barrett Browning's 1850 Poems employ the spiritual
dialogue that Rossetti uses in so many of her poems to present, in the
former, the struggle between the reclusive heart and the world, and in
the latter, the dialogue between self and soul, the human and the di-
vine. The subtly complex and passionate "Confessions," with its dia-
logical representation of the divided subject, and its enactment of an
intense struggle between human and divine love, is particularly like
many of Rossetti's dialogical lyrics in its manner and subject matter.
"Face to face in my chamber, my silent chamber, I saw her: / God and
she and I only": so these "confessions" begin. Another dramatic lyric
by Barrett Browning, "My Heart and I" (Works, 6:31-33), represents
the inner division between the observing and the suffering self. As
Rossetti acknowledged, "My Heart and I" is a poem she echoed in the
second lyric of the two-part "Twilight Night" (Poems, 1:212). 23Such

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352/ VICTORIANPOETRY

textual affiliations and the larger parallels they reflect suggest the
need to qualify in some respects Angela Leighton's otherwise illumi-
nating opposition between BarrettBrowning'sfocus on sexual politics
and social structuresand Rossetti's riddlingrepresentationsof "moral
and emotional"subjects.24
The affinities in poetic practice I am alluding to here were not, I
think, what Dante Gabriel Rossetti had in mind when he denounced
the Barrett-Browning"taint"in some his sister's poems. Nor did he
have in mind Barrett Browning'smany devotional and religious po-
ems: works like "The Sleep," "My Doves," or the highly original
meditative dramatic monologue, "The Virgin Mary to the Child
Jesus,"which reveal the extent to which Barrett Browning partici-
pated in the Tractarian"sacramentalaesthetic" that Mary Arseneau
has shown to be central to Christina Rossetti's poetics.25 As one
might expect, BarrettBrowning'spolemical political poems were, in-
deed, associatedwith the "taint."Yet surprisingly,in commenting on
the contents of Christina's 1875 volume, Dante Gabriel did not
greatly object to his sister's most overt attempts to emulate Barrett
Browning'sexample in this respect:her venture into the sphere of do-
mestic politics in "A Royal Princess,"a poem published in 1863 in a
collection designed to help relieve working-class distress (Poems,
1:284), and her venture into the sphere of foreign politics in two po-
ems on "The German-FrenchCampaign, 1870-1871" (Poems, 1:214-
216). Instead, after noting that the second of the two poems on the
Franco-Prussianwarwas "justa little echoish of the Barrett-Browning
style," Dante Gabriel proceeded to condemn the "realtaint" and the
"modernvicious style derived from the same source"in "The Lowest
Room." Harshly criticizing the train of "falsettomuscularity"he saw
as being "much too prominent"in this "long piece," and the similar
"tone" with "the same genesis" in "No thank you, John" and "The
Queen of Hearts,"he bluntly lecturedhis sister: "everythingin which
this tone appearsis utterly foreign to your primaryimpulses."His re-
gret that his sister had chosen to include "The Lowest Room"in her
1875 collection "forthe first time" implies that his editorial strictures
may have led to the poem's exclusion from her previousvolumes. He
also issued a heavy-handed warning: "If I were you, I would rigidly
keep guardon this matter if you write in the future, and ultimately
exclude from your writings everything (or almost everything) so
tainted."26Fortunately, Christina rejected her brother's advice in
publishing "The Lowest Room"(although almost twenty years passed
before it appearedin print), much as she resisted his evident objec-
tions to the "coarse"and unwomanlysubject matter of the penetrat-

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 MARJORIESTONE l353

ing dramatic monologue, "'The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the

Children"' (Harrison, CR, p. 16), and his suggestion that the latter
should be entitled (feebly and innocuously) "Upon the Children."27
When one considers the number of poems left unpublished by Chris-
tina, however, including some of her finest - the sonnet "In an
Artist's Studio" and the brilliant Browningesque dramatic monologue,
"'Look on this picture and on this'" (written in the same year as "The
Lowest Room") - one is left wondering if Dante Gabriel may have
been only too successful as a censor of his younger sister's more radi-
cal works.28
What exactly did Dante Gabriel find so objectionable in "The
Lowest Room," a poem that is, on the surface at least, more confined
to the sphere of conventional femininity than his sister's more overtly
political poems? And why, though he finds "a good deal" of the
Barrett-Browning style in "A Royal Princess," does he nevertheless,
in the same letter, consider it "too good to omit"? These are puzzling
questions, given that "The Lowest Room," a subtly dialogic dramatic
monologue using a ballad stanza, is in many respects more in keeping
with Rossetti's most successful and characteristic poetic practices (her
"primary impulses") than "A Royal Princess." Perhaps one reason why
Dante Gabriel may have found "A Royal Princess" the less offensive
poem of the two is that the Barrett-Browning "taint" in it derives less
from Barrett Browning's political poems than from "Lake Geraldine's
Courtship," a work that many nineteenth-century male readers (in-
cluding Carlyle) seem to have liked enormously because of its male
narrative perspective, its lushly erotic imagery, and its wish-fulfill-
ment plot, featuring a love-match between the aspiring peasant-poet
protagonist and the high-born gifted beauty, Lady Geraldine.
In "A Royal Princess," Rossetti echoes "Lady Geraldine's Court-
ship" in her use of a long, trochaic line, in her emphasis on the prin-
cess' royal lineage (her princess is "king-descended" [1. i], like
Geraldine with her "kingly blood" [1. 7]), and in representing the
pomp, power, and luxury that surround her.29In a strategic revision of
Barrett Browning's poem, however, no romantic plot provides Ros-
setti's princess with a lower-born lover - even though she says that
she "Would rather be a peasant with a baby at her breast" (1. 2) than
a royal princess. Some passages in the manuscript of "A Royal Prin-
cess" express the speaker's romantic desire, but Rossetti chose to
delete these and to focus instead on the princess' loving self-sacrifice,
like the Biblical Esther's, for her starving people. Nevertheless,
although "A Royal Princess" reveals Rossetti experimenting with
and strategically altering one of the more successful strings in Bar-

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354/ VICTORIANPOETRY

rett Browning's lyre, the princess herself remains too idealized for
the poem to be successful as either a dramatic monologue or a politi-
cal poem.
"The Lowest Room," with its complex dramatic portrayal of a
restless and aspiring woman and her conflicted feelings for the
younger sister who eclipses her in beauty, in love, in dutiful feminin-
ity, and in spiritual contentment, is a much more interesting poem -
not only because the strong influence of Barrett Browning is regis-
tered this time in a poetic medium more suited to Rossetti's distinc-
tive genius, but also because the energies aroused in Rossetti by her
precursor's liberating example are so powerful and so unresolved. It is
clearly the matter as much as the manner - the "modern vicious
style"- that Dante Rossetti objected to in this depiction of a contem-
porary Victorian woman who, while sitting and watching her young
sister sewing, speaks of her fierce delight in Homer's epic representa-
tions of gods, mighty heroes, and "crest-rearing kings" (1. 45). "'Old
Homer leaves a sting,'" she wryly observes (1. 24), as she evokes the
world of Homeric heroes who "hated with intenser hate / And loved
with fuller love" (11.59-60). Like Laura in Goblin Market after she has
tasted of the goblin fruit, this woman is possessed by a devouring de-
sire. The strong "wine" of Homer's poetry (1. 29) leads her to reject
bitterly the "blank life" (1. 70) of the typical Victorian woman in the
"stunted" modern world (1. 106) as no better than the "holes" in the
"waste of white" (11. 79-80) her more conventional sister labors
over - working as contentedly as the innocent Lizzie in Goblin Mar-
ket, who milked, churned, baked, "whipped up cream," fed the poul-
try, and "sat and sewed ... as modest maidens should" beside the
fallen Laura who exists in an "absent dream" (11. 203-211). Like
Laura, the speaker in "The Lowest Room" "dwindle[s] paler" (1. 3) as
she feeds her strong desire: while her sister picks flowers, she chooses
"a book to read and dream" (1. 209).
As the contrast between the masculine images drawn from "old
Homer" with his "sting" and the blank "holes" in a "waste of white"
suggest, the parallels between "The Lowest Room" and Aurora Leigh
are striking, given Aurora's use of sewing metaphors to convey the
culturally produced vacuity of a Victorian lady's life, and her famous
invocation of "Homer's heroes"- though unlike Rossetti's speaker,
Aurora's "double vision" of past and present leads her to see that
Homer's heroes never could have "measured twelve feet high" (Au-
rora Leigh, Book 5, 11. 184, 146). But as Harrison notes, "The Lowest
Room," dated September 30, 1856, in manuscript, could not have
been influenced by Aurora Leigh, which did not appear until later that

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 MARJORIESTONE /355

year. He points instead to the echoes of "Hector in the Garden"

(Works, 3:170-174), an earlier poem by Barrett Browning that he sees
Rossetti as "deliberately" challenging. In this poem, after musing on
the giant body of Hector she fashioned out of flowers in the garden of
her childhood, the speaker resolves to "wake up" and pursue "life's
heroic ends," though her past be "dead as Hector / And though Hec-
tor is twice dead" (11. 105-108). "This is precisely the sort of ambition
Rossetti's poem, through its sisterly dialogue, cautions against,"
Harrison observes. In the place of "such prospectively unwomanly and
un-Christian ambitions," she presents "two separate but ideologically
compatible alternatives": the domesticity and wifehood of the
younger sister, and the "superior Christian devotion" of the older sis-
ter who lives "alone" and takes "the lowest place" (I. 271 ).30
The difficulty with this reading, however, is that both of the sis-
ters and the alternatives they embody are undercut by ironic contra-
dictions throughout "The Lowest Room," much as they are in Barrett
Browning's "Bertha in the Lane," an important Ur-text for Rossetti's
poem (and, ironically, given his objections to the Barrett Browning
"taint," for Dante Rossetti's "The Bride's Prelude").31 Barrett
Browning's two sisters, the younger Bertha and the older unnamed
speaker of her dramatic monologue, are more overt rivals than the sis-
ters in "The Lowest Room," in that Bertha's youth and beauty capture
the heart of her sister's betrothed lover. But just as the sweetness and
sisterly affection of the younger Bertha for her older sister are under-
cut by the suggestion that she will quickly "forget" her dying, eclipsed
sister after the latter's death (1. 217), so the Christian sentiments and
sisterly concern of the younger sibling in Rossetti's poem are undercut
by the "all-forgetful" (1. 259) way in which she ceases to think about
both Christ and her sister when she hears her lover's step on the
walk. There is also something subtly suggestive of the "sluggish wife"
in Rossetti's "A Triad" (Poems, 1:29) in the way in which the younger
sister in "The Lowest Room" becomes the perfect wife and "main
wealth" (1. 238) of an "honourable" husband and produces a sinisterly
perfect golden-haired clone of herself, "Fair image of her own fair
youth" (1. 241), as she thrives "like a vine which full of fruit / Doth
cling and lean and climb toward heaven / While earth still binds its
root" (my emphasis; 11. 250-252). Yet it was this sister who once
rightly said in response to her older sister's passion for the Homeric
past, "Why should not you, why should not I / Attain heroic
strength?" (11. 115-116).
The words of the older sisters who are the speakers in "The Low-
est Room" and "Bertha in the Lane" are similarly undercut by ironic

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356/ VICTORIANPOETRY

contradictions as they set their sights on a higher place in heaven

than on earth." Hence the contradictions between the martyr-like
forgiveness of Bertha her older sister expresses and the bitterness she
reveals in spitting plosives: "Fit that I be plucked for thee!" (1. 182);
and hence the bathetic rhyme and telling word order of her dying
words- "I aspire while I expire"- as "death-strong" in her soul she
echoes Tennyson's St. Simeon and offers the "poor libation" of her
"love in its self-spending" while "The hosannas nearer roll" (11. 226-
238). The older sister in Rossetti's poem similarly insists on her mar-
tyr-like contentment with her lot, simultaneously revealing her fes-
tering discontent: "So now in patience I possess / My soul year after
tedious year, / Content to take the lowest place" (my emphasis;
11. 269-271). Unlike Rossetti herself in her devotional lyrics "The
Lowest Place" (Poems, 1:187) and "'Sit down in the lowest room'"
(Poems, 2:259), this sister shows little of the love for God that makes
the former lyric so moving, and little of the subtle awareness both lyr-
ics express that one should not "ask"for or "desire" the "lowest place"
simply in order to be highest in heaven. Instead, like Barrett
Browning's speaker, the older "second" sister in "The Lowest Room"
focuses in her closing words on the reward she hopes to earn "When
all deep secrets shall be shown, / And many last be first."
The complicating ironies in "The Lowest Room" indicate that
Rossetti is not endorsing either sister's actual life as an ideal alterna-
tive to "unwomanly" heroic ambitions; nor, I think is she discrediting
the pursuit of "heroic ends" Barrett Browning speaks of at the end of
"Hector in the Garden." She is, however, dramatically exploring the
difficulty of determining the kind of heroic ends one should pursue,
much as Tennyson does in "Ulysses" through the complex opposition
he sets up between Ulysses' quest "To strive, to seek, to find" and
Telemachus' less obiously heroic dutiful sense of familial responsibil-
ity. "The Lowest Room" seems to reflect Rossetti's intense struggle
with vocational and spiritual choices in the mid 1850s. This was a
period when she wished to join her Aunt Eliza Polidori in the Crimea
working as a nurse with Florence Nightingale (certainly, a heroic
ambition), and when her friendship with Barbara Leigh Smith, later
Barbara Bodichon, must have brought her into close contact with
some very progressive ideas concerning women's vocational oppor-
tunities.32
Despite the Crimean scheme, however, Rossetti's primary voca-
tional aspirations in this period seem to have been artistic, as they
had been in 1850 in Maude, These aspirations are indirectly revealed
in "The Lowest Room" when the speaker ruefully contrasts herself to

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 STONE /357
MARJOR1E

Homer: "'He stirs my sluggish pulse like wine, / He melts me like the
wind of spice. ... I cannot melt the sons of men'" (11. 29-30, 33).
The bitter observation that "'Some must be second and not first; / All
cannot be the first of all'" (11. 17-18) therefore seems to be as much a
comparison between writers as between sisters. Like the Romantic po-
ets as Harold Bloom and others have described them, Rossetti here
expresses a strong anxiety of belatedness. And she reveals an uncanny
affinity with Barrett Browning in making Homer the focus of her
anxiety. Barrett Browning had herself, of course, desired in her auda-
ciously ambitious girlhood to be the "feminine of Homer. Many per-
sons wd. be obliged to say that she was a little taller than Homer if
anything," she amusingly recalled.33
Yet Homer is not the only rival who appears to be on Rossetti's
mind in "The Lowest Room," as the pervasive echoes of Barrett
Browning and Rossetti's focus on two sisters indicate. If Barrett
Browning had established herself as the "first" great female poet in
England by 1850, then Rossetti herself could only be "second." Given
the ambition that she both expresses and critiques through the older
sister of "The Lowest Room," this was not a position Rcssetti was
about to accept without questioning. In this respect, Harrison is abso-
lutely right, I believe, in reading "The Lowest Room" as a poem in
which Rossetti is challenging her primary female precursor- though
the poem she is more directly challenging seems to be "Wine of
Cyprus" (Works, 3:134-140), not "Hector in the Garden" (or "Bertha
in the Lane," her structural Ur-text). The image of Homer stirring
the speaker's pulses like "wine" is particularly reminiscent of "Wine
of Cyprus," a wonderfully whimsical and sensuous poem in which
Barrett Browning turns a bottle of honey wine sent to her by Hugh
Stuart Boyd into a symbol of the poetic heritage she had imbibed
with him in their studies of Greek texts. I say "imbibed" because
"Wine of Cyprus" is a parody of a drinking and boasting song, with its
opening allusion to "old Bacchus," its images of Titans drinking- "riv-
ers," and of Pan, Fauns, Naiads, and wild Bacchantes crying for more
wine "of such a taste!" (1. 24). Unlike these "antique drinkers"
(1. 33), Barrett Browning presents herself as sipping at her gift of
honey wine "Like a fly or gnat" brushed aside by Juno's arm. But
through the wealth and learnedness of her classical allusions, she
makes it very clear by the poem's end that she has drunk very deeply
from the "beaker" of the classical poetic heritage: "None can murmur
with a sigh / That, in drinking from that beaker, / I am sipping like a
fly" (11. 174-176). In fact, she presents herself as drunk on it, so to
speak: "As Ulysses' old libation / Drew the ghosts from every part," so

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358/ VICTORIANPOETRY

the recollection of studying Greek poets associated with the wine of

her "dearGrecian, / Stirs the Hadesof [her]heart"(11.61-64).
These lines in "Wine of Cyprus,"as well as Barrett Browning's
key question in the poem- "Can I answer the old thinkers / In the
forms they thought of, now?"(11.35-36)- directly relate to the de-
bate between past and present, and between pagan glory and Chris-
tian virtue, that Rossetti presents in "The Lowest Room."In one de-
leted stanza of Rossetti's poem, for example, the older sister claims
that the pagan Greeks "pouredlibations to the Gods / With faith"
that shames Christians in Christian lands (Poems, 1:302). This is an
idea that Barrett Browning comes close to expressing in "Wine of
Cyprus"in asserting that Plato is "divine"if "men know their gods
aright," and in describing Greek poets as the "cup-bearers"of "the
wine that's meant for souls"(11.95-98). It is claims such as these, one
suspects, that probablyprecipitated Rossetti's most intense dispute
with Barrett Browning in "The Lowest Room," a poem that is aptly
entitled, in the manuscript, "A Fight Over the Body of Homer."
"'What are such'" as Homer, the younger sister asks in Rossetti's
poem, "'To us who learn of Christ?'" (11. 155-156). Of course,
Rossetti would have been highly aware that Barrett Browning had
made her own position on ChristianityversusGreek poetic glory very
clear in "The Dead Pan" and in her many religious poems. But her
"fight" in this instance is with the views expressed in "Wine of
Cyprus."Nevertheless, the multiple echoes of other worksby Barrett
Browning as well in "The Lowest Room" indicate that the complex
intertextuality of "The Lowest Room" cannot be reduced to any
single intertextual debate. The poem embodies a numberof conflicts
and struggles,not the least of which is Rossetti's largerstrugglewith
the intimidatingprecedentset by her older sister in art.
This struggleintensifiedas Rossetti turned increasinglyawayfrom
the world in her later poetry, in many waysreversingthe trajectoryof
Barrett Browning'swriting career. One sister ceased to sing of sera-
phim and angels, focusing on the social, political, and erotic experi-
ences of this world, and learningto see, as Auroradoes, that the "'de-
spised poor earth'" is "The healthy odorous earth" (Book 9, 11.652-
653). The other evoked the beauty of the earth with intense lyrical
beauty, only to sheer abruptlyawayfrom it to the "bettercountry"of
heaven (Poems,1:195), scorning the world she had praised:"O earth,
earth, earth, thou yet shalt bow . . . Exposedand valued at thy worth"
(Poems, 3:212). Yet for all their differences- the natural supernatu-
ralism of one versus the supernaturalismof the other, their very dif-
ferent ideas of what Rossetti called "the Poet mind," their diverging

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 MARJORIESTONE /359

aesthetic principles - the connections between these two sisters in art

remain very strong. We need much more investigation of these con-
nections, which have been surprisingly neglected despite the active
interest in reconstructing traditions of women writers.
This neglect reflects a larger pattern of historical elision, in so far
as Barrett Browning's influence on the Pre-Raphaelite poets in gen-
eral- on their ballad writing and on their medieval iconography, for
example - still remains largely unexplored.34 But there has also been a
troubling tendency to play Barrett Browning and Rossetti off against
each other. Too often, Rossetti critics tend to emphasize the tradi-
tional qualities of Barrett Browning's poetry in order to foreground
her successor's achievement. This tendency is troubling because it re-
inforces deeply ingrained cultural assumptions that there can only be
one great woman writer among a particular group of writers. She is
"alone of all her sex," so to speak. Whereas literary historians en-
shrined Tennyson and Robert Browning as the "two kings" of Victo-
rian poetry, to use one critic's revealing terms, they were prepared to
acknowledge only one Victorian woman poet as the "Queen of
Song."35 The assumptions underlying such judgments contribute to
cultural contexts that exacerbate conflicts between women writers: if
women writers are sometimes "wicked" to each other, in short, it may
be in some instances at least because their critics can be "wicked" in
drawing invidious comparisons. As in Rossetti's sister poems, one sis-
ter is always constructed as more pleasing than the other. Witness
Arthur Waugh's 191 5 judgment that Rossetti succeeded because she
accepted the "burden of womanhood" whereas Mrs. Browning failed
because she tried "to make a woman's voice thunder like a man's," a
comment that chimes with Dante Rossetti's mistrust of Barrett
Browning's "falsetto muscularity" (cited in Rosenblum, p. 1). Surely it
is time to approach Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti
as we approach Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson: as two pro-
foundly innovative and accomplished poets who share many cultural
concerns and textual practices, yet who are nevertheless strikingly
different. That said, no doubt individual readers will persist in finding
themselves drawn to one sister a little more than to the other sister,
depending upon their tastes, interests, and assumptions. Such a
phenonemon would have surprised neither the author of "Bertha in
the Lane"nor the writer of "The Lowest Room."

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360/ VICTORIANPOETRY

Notes

I would like to thank the Social Sciences and HumanitiesResearchCouncil

of Canadafor supportingthe researchon BarrettBrowningdrawnon in this
article, and MaryArsenau,Antony Harrison,and Chris Wiesenthal for their
helpful commentsand suggestions.
i Linda E. Marshall,"'Transfigured to His Likeness':Sensible Transcended
talism in Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market,'" UTQ 63 (1994): 436.
Like Marshall, Janet Galligani Casey emphasizes the fusion of the
maternalwith the sororalin Lizzie'sChrist-like act (in "The Potential of
Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti's GoblinMarket" VP 29 [1991]: 71). See
also Dorothy Mermin, "Heroic Sisterhood in Goblin Market,"VP 21
(1983): 107-118.
2 Betsy Erkkila, The Wicked Sisters: Women Poets, LiteraryHistory and
Discord (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 5, 7; Helena Michie,
Sororophobia: DifferencesAmong WomenIn Literatureand Culture (New
York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). Michie emphasizes "personal"
differences among women ("Why should the concept of sisterliness not
include, among other elements, competition and envy?"), as well as
cultural differences. The appearance of these books in the same year
manifestsan importantparadigmshift in feminist literarycriticism.
3 Antony H. Harrison, "In the Shadow of E.B.B.: Christina Rossetti," in
Victorian Poets and Romantic Poems: Intertextuality and Ideology
(Charlottesville:Univ. Pressof Virginia, 1990), pp. 112-114.
4 Virginia Sickbert, "ChristinaRossetti and Victorian Children'sPoetry:A
MaternalChallenge to the PatriarchalFamily,"VP 31 (1993): 386. In the
article cited above, Marshalllikewise emphasizesboth Rossetti's closeness
to her mother, the only person with whom "she was physically
demonstrative"(p. 437), and her repeatedinscriptionsof the "nameof the
Mother"in her poetry.
5 Barrett Browning'srepresentationsof the mother (for example, Marian
Erie's mother in AuroraLeigh)are ambivalent relative to Rossetti's, but,
as I elsewhere argue, the positive influence of her mother on her poetics
in her case as well is apparentboth in her early yearsand in the returnof
the repressedmother manifestedin her worksafter 1840. See Chap. 1 in
MarjorieStone, ElizabethBarrettBrowning(London:Macmillan, 1995).
6 The CompleteWorksof ElizabethBarrettBrowning,ed. Charlotte Porterand
Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (1900; New York:AMS Press, 1973), 3:209-210.
All subsequent references to Barrett Browning's works (with the
exception of AuroraLeigh)are to this edition.
7 Harrison analyzes the radical revisions of "Maude Clare" and "The
. Bourne"to illustrate this "poetics of conciseness"(CR, Chap. 2). Dante
Gabriel's influence on this poetics is particularlyevident in Christina's
letter to her brotheron March31, 1865, in which she tells him that she
has deleted a stanza at his suggestion in "Birdor Beast?"and cut "The
Ghost's Petition" short. However, she also tells him that she has stood by
Stanza 2 of "JessieCameron"as "essential."Significantly, she amusingly

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 STONE /361
MARJOR1E

refers to the "paroxysmsof stamping,foaming, hair-uprooting"his acute

criticisms initially provoked in her, using images that register a secret
resistance in so far as they invoke the exorcism Laura experiences in
Goblin Market (11.493-521). See the Rossetti Papers 1862 to 1870, ed.
William Michael Rossetti (London: Sands, 1903), pp. 93-94; hereafter
cited as Rossetti Papers.
8 See, for example, my discussionof the most substantialadditions to "The
Romaunt of the Page" in "A Cinderella Among the Muses: Barrett
Browning and the Ballad Tradition,"VictorianLiteratureand Culture21
(1993): 233-268. A similar pattern of revision appearsin the successive
versions of "Catarina to Camoens" and in the manuscripts of "The
RunawaySlave at Pilgrim'sPoint"and "Rhymeof the DuchessMay."
9 I analyze Barrett Browning's gynocentric "audacity of authorship" in
AuroraLeighand survey the critical tradition that erased it from literary
history in Chapters4 and 5 of MarjorieStone, ElizabethBarrettBrowning.
10 Unfortunately, Rossetti decided not to proceed with a study of Barrett
Browningbecause Ingramwas unable to secureRobertBrowning'scooper-
ation and because she strongly sympathizedwith Browning's"reticence
where one so near and dear to him is concerned"(cited by Bell, p. 101).
11 Cited by Harrison,CR, p. 1. For the comparisonof this credoto Aurora
Leigh,see Harrison's"Inthe Shadowof E.B.B.,"p. 112.
12 Another lyric in Maude,"Sleep, let me sleep," echoes both "Tears,Idle
Tears" in its intense nostalgia for the "happydays that shall return no
more" and the preceding song in The Princess("The splendourfalls on
castle walls") in the lines, "The echoes take it [a song loved in "daysof
yore"]up and up along / The hills" (see Maude:Proseand Verse,ed. R. W.
Crump[Hamden,Connecticut: Archon Books, 1976], p. 72). In both her
allusion to BarrettBrowningin "ThreeNuns"and her echoes of Tennyson
in "Sleep, let me sleep,"Rossetti self-reflexivelyintroducesan echo image
that underlinesher literaryborrowings.
13 "The Romance of the Swan's Nest" (Works,3:141-145), the protag-
In
onist Ellie creates an elaborate romantic fantasy concerning a courtly
lover that culminates in her dream of revealing to him the eggs in a
swan's nest hidden among the reeds. But the "romance"is chillingly
dissolved when Ellie discoversthat the "wild swan"has deserted its nest,
and that a "rathad gnawedthe reeds"- and presumablyeaten the eggs as
well (11.95-96). Similarly in "Symbols" the speaker dreams of the
"perfect"culmination of her desires in watching a "nest"in which "three
speckled eggs were laid."But when the eggs "shouldhave hatched in May,
/ The two old birdshad grownafraid/ Or tired, and flew away"(11.7-12).
Since Dolores Rosenblum reads "Symbols"as an important model of
Rossetti's personal "myth-making"(Rosenblum,pp. 21-25), the probable
echo of BarrettBrowninghere is particularlysignificant.The image of the
nest remaineda central symbolfor Rossetti throughouther career,used to
convey erotic desire, the longing for a mate, the tense intimacy of two
unequal sister nestlings (in "The Lowest Room"), maternal fulfillment,
and most often, as in "ThreeNuns," spiritualfulfillment in the "nest"of
Paradise.

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362/ VICTORIANPOETRY

14 Glennis Stephenson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the Poetry of Love

(London: UMI Research Press, 1989), p. 5. See George Monteiro, "On
First Looking into Strangford'sCamoens: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's
'Catarina to Camoens,'" SBHC 8 (1980): 7-19 for a full discussion of
Camoens'popularityin the early nineteenth century.
15 Dorothy Mermin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Origins of a New Poetry
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 103.
16 See the Indexof LiteraryManuscripts,ed. BarbaraRosenbaumand Pamela
White (London:Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982), 4:107.
17 The falling tears at the close of "The Blessed Damozel"are even more
reminiscent of the last words of A Dramaof Exile than of the close of
"Catarina":"Thereis a sound throughthe silence, as of the falling tears of
an angel" (Works2:226). Florence Boos lists some of the many echoes of
Elizabeth Barrett's 1838 and 1844 volumes in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's
poetry (The Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Critical Reading and Source
Study[The Hague:Mouton, 1976], pp. 279-281).
18 In her perceptive analysis of the spiritual progressionreflected in the
differing discourses of Rossetti's three nuns, Rosenblum links the first
poem of the sequence to Keats, and interpretsthe "holy bird"as offering
only a "temporaryopiate" like the bird in Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"
(Rosenblum, pp. 179-180). But the "holy bird" sings on a "living tree,"
clearly indicating its association with the "Tree of Life" the third nun
refers to (1. 140), and Rossetti's footnote indicates that she intends the
readerto connect the bird'ssong not with the song of Keats'snightingale,
but with the refrainline in BarrettBrowning's"Catarinato Camoens."
19 I am grateful to Wellesley College Libraryfor permission to examine
materials in its English Poetry Collection. In the same printer's copy,
BarrettBrowningalso revises the title of her poem from "Stanzason the
Death of Mrs. Hemans, Written In ReferenceTo Miss Landon'sPoem on
the Same Subject,"to the more curiousand elliptical "FeliciaHemans:To
L.E.L.,ReferringTo Her Monodyon the Poetess."The use of a colon after
"Hemans" (unlike the period that appears in the Porter and Clarke
edition), emphasizesthe "chain letter" effect of the title and the direct
addressto Landon.This effect is also apparentin the original title of the
poem in the New MonthlyMagazine:"StanzasAddressedto Miss Landon,
and Suggestedby Her Stanzason the Death of Mrs.Hemans."
20 I did not, however, have the opportunitybefore this article went to press
to examine the 1839 version of "L.E.L.'sLast Question,"published in the
Januaryissue of the Athenaeum,or the 1844 version.
21 Rossetti's contrast is particularlyreminiscentof the scene in Book Five of
AuroraLeighin which Aurora,alone in her room,struggleswith the difficulty
of having her books "appraisedby love, associatedwith love" while she sits
"loveless,"before she attends Lord Howe's social gathering, where she
wearsa maskmuch as Rossetti'sL.E.L.does. See AuroraLeigh,ed. Margaret
Reynolds(Athens: Ohio Univ. Press,1992), Book 5, 11.475-476.
22 See Rosenblum's "Christina Rossetti and Poetic Sequence" in Kent,
pp. 132-158.

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 MARJORIESTONE /363

23 "Alas! that we must dwell, my heart and I / So far asunder"(11.22-23)

echoes the refrain line and title of Barrett Browning'spoem. Part II of
"Twilight Night" was originally entitled "Tomorrow."Dante Rossetti
evidently drew his sister's attention to the echo, leading her to reply,
"Unless memoryplays me false, Mrs. Browning'sM)>Heartand I does not
clash with my To-morrow:if it does, I could easily turn my own 'heart'
into a 'wish,' and save the little piece" (Rossetti Papers, p. 81). The
Brownings seem to have been on Rossetti's mind in writing "Twilight
Night": in its structureand some of its images, it also resemblesRobert
Browning'spairedlyrics, "Meetingat Night" and "Partingat Morning."
24 Angela Leighton, VictorianWomenPoets: WritingAgainstthe Heart (New
York:HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1992), p. 129. Leighton suggeststhat Barrett
Browningcritiques the tradition of female sensibility "fromwithout" and
Rossetti undermines it "from within" (p. 154). Rosenblum similarly
contrasts Rossetti's lyric poetry with Barrett Browning's"narrativeand
discursive"poetry (Rosenblum,p. 2).
25 Mary Arsenau, "Incarnationand Interpretation:Christina Rossetti, the
OxfordMovement, and GoblinMarket,"VP 31 (1993): 79-93- All three of
these poems appeared in Barrett Browning's 1838 volume (see Works,
Vol. 2). This volume, with its title poem The Seraphim,is an important
early manifestation of the sacramental aesthetic and the medieval
iconography that the Tractarian movement helped to popularize. "The
Sleep," one of Barrett Browning'sbest loved poems in the nineteenth
century, probablyheld a particularappeal for Rossetti: she wrote several
poems invoking the passage in Psalm 127.2, "He giveth His beloved
sleep,"used as a refrainin "TheSleep."
26 Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, ed. William Michael Rossetti
(London:Ellis, 1895), 2:323.
27 See Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, 2:321. "The Iniquity of the
Fathers"was initially entitled "Underthe Rose."
28 Leighton calls attention to the brilliant way in which "'Look on this
picture and on this'" (Poems,3:254-259) exposes the "lies and cruelties"
of the male lover it represents,going beyond the "secularexposures"of
Barrett Browning's ballads (Victorian Women Poets, p. 134). This
monologue is more like Browningthan Barrett Browning in its manner,
but like the lighter, more satiric "'No, Thank You, John'" (Poems, 1:50-
51) or the very similar "'Last Night'" (Poems, 3:37-38), published in
Macmillan'sMagazine in 1865 but never republished, "'Look on this
picture'"critiques male egoism and infidelity in love. Dante Rossetti may
have associated the "vicious modern style" of "'No, Thank You, John'"
with dramatic lyrics by Barrett Browning like "A Man's Requirements"
(Works, 3:206-208). Rossetti's ballad "Margery"(Poems, 3:289-290),
concerning a girl ruined by love and obsessed by her faithless lover, is
another unpublishedwork in which she sharplycritiques male infidelity
and the sexual double standard.
29 Rossetti transfers this power to the militaristic, ruthless father of the
princess, but the description and verse form are often similar. Compare,
for example, the princess' description of her father- "He has quarrelled

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364/ VICTORIANPOETRY

with his neighbours, he has scourged his foes; / Vassal counts and princes
follow where his pennon goes" (11. 22-23) - with the description oi
Geraldine: "Many vassals bow before her as her carriage sweeps the
doorway" and "She has voters in the Commons, she has lovers in the
palace" (11. 21, 25). There are also interesting parallels between "A Royal
Princess" and a ballad that Barrett Browning worked on in the 1840s, but
never completed and published: "The Princess Marie."
30 Antony Harrison, "In the shadow of E.B.B.," Victorian Poets and Romantic
Poems, pp. 124-126. In her very different reading, Rosenblum stresses not
the Christian devotion of the oder sister, but her "freedom to ruminate, to
be herself" (Rosenblum, p. 165).
31 See Barrett Browning, Works, 3:97-106. Aside from the parallel situations
and contexts linking both "The Lowest Room" and "The Bride's Prelude"
to "Bertha in the Lane" (two sisters in the period leading up to one sister's
bridal, one sister's confession to the other of hidden knowledge or desires,
conflict and tensions between the sisters), there are noticeable verbal
echoes of Barrett Browning's poem. For example, in "The Lowest Room,"
there are the references to the younger sister embroidering what is
evidently a bridal gown (in "Bertha in the Lane" it is the older sister who
embroiders this for her sister); the reference to the younger sister's
"larger" eyes in "Bertha" (1. 20) and in the manuscript of "The Lowest
Room" - altered to "softer" in the published poem (I. 14); and the
listening for the lover's footsteps in "Bertha" (11. 190-191) and in "The
Lowest Room" (1. 227).
32 William Rossetti describes his sister's desire to join in Florence
Nightingale's work in his Introduction to her Works, p. lvi. For references
to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's friendship with Barbara Leigh Smith in the
years leading up to her publication of Women and Work (1857) see Dante
Gabriel Rossetti: His Family Letters, 2:120, 126, 128, 136. Harrison has
pointed out to me that Christina Rossetti also had a close friendship with
Bodichon, and wrote numerous letters to her.
33 "Untitled Essay," The Brownings' Correspondence, ed. Philip Kelley and
Ronald Hudson (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgestone Press, 1983-), 1:361.
34 Rosenblum suggests that Christina Rossetti's ballads are written in a
tradition "derived from Percy through Scott" ("Christina Rossetti and
Poetic Sequence," in Kent, p. 135). But this overlooks the ways in which
this tradition was popularized and adapted by Barrett Browning (see my
article, "A Cinderella Among the Muses"). There are many intertextual
connections linking both Christina Rossetti's and Dante Gabriel
Rossetti's ballads to Barrett Browning's.
35 See Hugh Walker, The Literature of the Victorian Era (Cambridge-
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1910), p. 287. Tricia Lootens traces the ways in
which Rossetti eclipsed Barrett Browning as England's "Queen of Song" in
her illuminating dissertation, "Elizabeth Barrett Browning: The Poet as
Heroine of Literary History" (Indiana, 1988).

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