Rossetti began translating La Vita Nuova in 1846, just prior to the establishment of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, and first published it together with The Early Italian Poets in 1861; he republished it in 1874 as Dante and his Circle. Dante's ‘Autopsychology’ as Rossetti called it, that fascinated him throughout his life, takes the form of autobiographical prose narrative interlaced with sonnets. Rossetti's translation of the Vita Nuova is a crucial text in understanding the significance to the Pre-Raphaelite cause of the figures of ‘Love’ and of ‘Beatrice’. There are many reasons why the Dante/Beatrice relationship would appeal to Rossetti and to other Pre- Raphaelite painters and poets; a key one is the notion of the artist's soul embodied in the female form; another is that Dante's sonnets, and his commentaries upon them, privilege ‘Love’ personified as a male figure in ways that invite visual representation. The sonnets subsequently enable the emergence of particular figures of sexual ambivalence as depicted in the work of Swinburne and Solomon. Moreover, the relationship of Dante and Beatrice resonates throughout Pre-Raphaelitism, not simply in the obvious sense of a poetic and artistic model of medieval idealized love (which it certainly was), but also as a relationship of excessive emotion twinned with a disproportionate amount of bodily contact or fulfilment. The Vita Nuova is also fundamental to this study for those ways in which Dante's representation of vision, and Rossetti's translator's gloss upon it, sheds light upon the power of sight as a principle metaphor for the Pre-Raphaelites. Dante's text is about realizing intangible things and, most specifically for our purposes, of rendering visible the image/text relation and realizing the physicality of language.

Early in his translation of the Vita Nuova Rossetti marks himself out as a reader of Dante who prefers to court, rather than resolve, ambiguity in his translation. Thus, on the issue of the meaning of the ‘new’ of the title, its signification of ‘young’ as well as ‘new’, Rossetti prefers, in contrast to some editors, what he terms ‘the more mystical interpretation of the words’, ‘as New Life’ over ‘Early Life’.