The essays in this volume demonstrate how the Rossettis – from the celebrated Dante Gabriel and Christina to the comparatively neglected Maria and William – drew upon a shared cultural experience, and describe how each contributed to the intellectual debates of the age and played a substantial role in their various fields. Bringing together significant contributions from some of the most renowned experts on the Rossettis, ‘Outsiders Looking In’ provides important new perspectives on this talented family and their brilliant legacy.

David Clifford is a Lecturer and Fellow of Homerton College, Cambridge.

Laurence Roussillon is Maitre de Conférence in Nineteenth-Century British Literature at the University of Louis Lumiere, Lyon 2, France.

List of Illustrations; Ackonowledgements; Contributors; Introduction; PART I: Italy and Italianness: 1. Sibling Cultures; 2. William Michael and Lucy Rossetti: Outsider Insiders – The True Cosmopolitans; PART II. Aesthetics in a Commercial World: 3. The Taxman and the Aesthete: the Canon according to William Michael Rossetti; 4. Copyright and Control: Christina Rossetti and her Publishers; 5. Recollections PB Shelley: William Michael Rossetti, Political Commitment and Literary Capital; PART III. Faith in an Age of Science: 6. Pews, Periodicals and Politics: The Rossetti Women as High Church Controversialists; 7. A Sort of Aesthetico-Catholic Revival: Christina Rossetti and the London Ritualist Scene; 8. In the Footsteps of His Father? Dantean Allegory in Gabriele Rossetti and Dante Gabriel Rossetti; 9. Mystic, Madwoman or Metaphysician? The Analogical Theodicy of Christina Rossetti; 10. Christina’s Challenge to Victorian Mentality: the Parodic, Unconventional Pattern of ‘My Dream’; PART  IV. Radical Poetics: 11. DG Rossetti and the Art of the Inner Standing Point; 12. Maundering Medievalism: Dante Gabriele Rossetti and William Morris’s Poetry; 13. The Aesthetics of Morbidity: DG Rossetti and Buchanan’s The Fleshly School of Poetry; PART V. Literary Tradition and the Rossetti Legacy: 14. ‘It Once Should Save as well as Kill’: DG Rossetti and the Feminine; 15. Pursuing the Well-Beloved: Thomas Hardy, Jocelyn Pearston and the School of Rossetti; 16. Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Poetic Daughters: Fin de Siècle Women Poets and the Sonnet; Selected Bibliography

‘This is a satisfying collection in which all the essays present original material which helps shed light on English culture in the nineteenth century.’ —’The Burlington Magazine’