¹ Christina Rosselli (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 312, hereafter cited by title parenthetically in my text. For other works mentioned the place of publication is London unless otherwise indicated.

² Henry W. Burroughs (Burrows), A Half-Century of Christ Church, Albany Street, privately printed (1887), pp. 33–34.

³ William M. Rossetti, ed., Ruskin: Rossetti: Preraphaelitism, 1854–1862 (1899), pp. 167–168.

⁴ Peter Anson, The Call of the Cloister (1955) and A. M. Allchin, The Silent Rebellion (1958). Thomas Jay Williams also touches upon the subject in Priscilla Lydia Sellon (New York, 1950).

⁵ In almost every instance the year date is added in pencil by William Rossetti, sometimes preceded by a question mark as in Letters 1, 3, and 4. In a few letters the month and day are in Maria’s handwriting. William’s conjectural dating, which I have checked against more precisely dated material, seems to be fairly accurate. I have, however, enclosed his additions in square brackets to distinguish them from Maria’s dated headings.

⁶ “Could Maria evoke from her Dantesque chronology, which I know is very minute,” Gabriel wrote his mother on 10 October 1872, “the exact year, month, and day, of Dante’s meeting with Beatrice in the Eden at the end of the Purgatorio? Would you ask her this if you write? I want the date for a picture. I dare say it would be found in her book [The Shadow of Dante], but I have not got that by me.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Family Letters with a Memoir, 2 vols. (1895), ii, 264, hereafter referred to parenthetically by volume and page. William identifies the picture as the predella to the Beata Beatrix (ii, 263).

⁷ Maria acknowledges indebtedness in her Shadow of Dante to “Signor Fraticelli, whose excellent diagrams have supplied the designs, though not the whole of the letterpress, for three of my own” (p. 7). She also mentions her obligation to Charles Bagot Cayley (1823–83), Christina’s admirer, who translated the Commedia in terza rima (pp. 6, 7). I do not know where she obtained her erroneous date for Easter Wednesday, which in 1300 fell on 13 April.

⁸ “There is a most comically fat and stolid pony here which Morris brought last year from Iceland,” Gabriel wrote his mother. “He is more like Sancho’s donkey than anything equine, and was never seen but twice from the window to do anything but eat in his private field. On two occasions only he was meditating with his back against a tree” (ii, 264). See also n. 11, below.

⁹ The Hospital where Maria was staying was opened in 1869 by the All Saints’ Sisterhood. The first hospital of its kind founded by an English religious order, it was likewise the first seaside convalescent home in England. Mrs. Frances Rossetti described it in a letter of 22 August 1876 as follows: “This large handsome building, which contains about 220 patients between infants, children, men & women, has in view the sea and the downs. Around it are flower beds, wall fruit trees and kitchen garden. In the court [are] fowls, & two fine dogs of St. Bernard. The chapel is very beautiful, large and rich in marbles. The organ is played by one of the Sisters, & any of the patients who like it are practised in singing the hymns. It is a moving sight to see them altogether.” Bodleian Rossetti MS. 22. See also L. M. Packer, The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1963), p. 101 and n. 2.

¹⁰ Gabriel’s secretary from 1872 to 1877. With his father, Dr. Thomas Gordon Hake, George saw Gabriel through the crisis and breakdown of June 1872, precipitated by Robert Buchanan’s initial attack upon him in the “Fleshly School of Poetry” controversy. Although Gabriel parted with his secretary in anger, the Rossetti connection, as William points out, was a favorable opportunity for a young man studying at Oxford and just beginning a literary career. W. M. Rossetti, Some Reminiscences, 2 vols. (1906), ii, 335–336; see also I, 333–334.

¹¹ Faringdon station was some seven miles from Kelmscott Manor, the celebrated house in Oxfordshire which Gabriel shared in joint tenancy with William Morris and his family. In giving his brother directions for reaching Kelmscott on William’s first visit there, Gabriel told him to take the 6:30 train from Paddington, change twice, at Didcot and Uffington, and take the fly from Faringdon to Kelmscott Manor, the whole journey taking between three and a half to four hours (ii, 262).

¹² The Rossettis moved to 56 Euston Square from 166 Albany Street in July 1867. In the spring of 1874 William brought his bride Lucy, Ford Madox Brown’s daughter, to Euston Square to live with his mother and sister, an unfortunate arrangement terminated by mutual consent in 1876 when Christina and her mother moved to 30 Torrington Square.

¹³ An unknown admirer sent Rossetti a painting of the Resurrection, which he attributed to Pietro Laurati. He presented the picture to Maria.

¹⁴ In May 1873 the internal tumor which was to cause Maria’s death in 1876 first made its appearance. In September of that year she joined the Sisterhood and began her novitiate. In this letter she is attempting to reassure Gabriel, who feared that the rigors of conventual life would further undermine her health. In view of her renewed illness, he considered the serious step she was taking “still more serious” (ii, 296). Her mother, too, was uneasy about her health, as well she might be, for “there was never any heat in the houses other than a small fire in the living-room,” Peter Anson tells us (op. cit., p. 320), “and this was never lit unless it was quite certain that the room would be used.” When Gabriel heard from his mother about the lack of heating at the convent, his concern for his sister deepened. “I have really felt very sincerely anxious about Maria since what you tell me of no fires in this blessed place,” he wrote in November 1873. “I simply could not exist on such terms—it would be a novitiate for another world; and I view the matter as most serious for her” (ii, 300).

¹⁵ Mrs. Rossetti with Christina visited Gabriel at Kelmscott in July 1873. After her departure he complained affectionately that it was “a privation not to see your dear old self trotting about the gardens, and the time we spent here, with Christina, was a most grateful one to me. That it may recur before long is one of my warmest wishes” (ii, 294). Although in 1874 Christina informed Gabriel that she and her mother would be coming to Kelmscott June 30, the visit did not materialize. W. M. Rossetti, ed., The Family Letters of Christina Georgina Rossetti (1908), p. 45, hereafter cited as Fam. Letters.

¹⁶ The reference is to Rossetti’s Italian sonnet “La Bella Mano.” He treated the subject in a well-known oil painting and also in an English sonnet. Both the English and the Italian versions may be found in The Collected Works, ed. W. M. Rossetti (1886, 1901 reprint), i, 372 and 373. The Italian sonnet is as follows:

¹⁷ See above, p. 614.

¹⁸ I assume Maria is referring to Ber Winning Ways, Dr. Hake’s novel published in 1874, rather than to his earlier volume of poetry, Parables and Tales, reviewed by Gabriel in the Fortnightly Review (April 1873), xix, 537–542. Thanking Gabriel, 23 June 1874, for sending the novel to Euston Square, Christina observed that she had not expected “such overflowing punnishness from grave and dignified Dr. Hake.” Fam. Letters, pp. 45–46.

¹⁹ I do not identify either Dr. Henry or Miss Martin though I would guess that Dr. Henry is George Hake’s brother. Mackenzie Bell in Christina Rossetti (1898) quotes a number of letters from Christina to Mr. Patchett Martin of Literary Opinion, but I do not know if there is any connection with Maria’s Martin family. Other Martins mentioned by Christina are Rosamund Martin of Chesham (“But I do not recognize the name,” Fam. Letters, pp. 203, 204) and a Mr. Martin, a builder and hotel owner at Birchington-on-sea, who was neighborly and helpful during Gabriel’s last illness of 1882. Ibid., pp. 108, 110, 112.

²⁰ I have added Summer to the date because of the place of this letter in the sequence. See Letter 5.

²¹ The sonnet Maria is discussing is Rossetti’s Italian sonnet for his picture Proserpina, notable as the first literary work he produced following his breakdown and illness of 1872. He sent William the sonnet on 7 November of that year. In 1874 “the sonnet on Prosperpina, in its Italian form, was discussed with our sister Maria,” William writes. “She agreed with the author in preferring the Italian to the English version.” W. M. Rossetti, ed., Dank Gabriel Rossetti as Designer and Writer (1899), pp. 160, 165, referred to hereafter as DGRDW. Both versions of the sonnet appear in the collected ed., i, 370, 371. I reproduce the Italian:

²² I cannot say to which picture Maria was referring. It might have been one of the seven versions of Proserpine (probably No. 4 as cited in DGRDW, p. 90), The Roman Widow, or possibly The Damsel of the Sangrad. Ibid., pp. 91–93. But in Christina’s letter of 1 October 1874 to Gabriel (William gives the date as conjectural) she speaks of a visit to his studio, closing with the frequently quoted passage, “I hail the prospect of seeing again the Proserpine, and for the first time the Veronica: where in England and its studios is your peer?” Fam. Letters, p. 47. But both William, op. cit., pp. 77, 96, and Marillier, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1899), pp. 117–118, assign the Veronica Veronese to 1872.

²³ It seems apparent that Maria was here indulging in a bit of matchmaking, though whether she had in mind her attractive former pupil or the wealthy and responsible daughter of the Berkeley Square banker and picture-collector is not quite clear. Perhaps she would have settled for either lady.

²⁴ I do not know what Irish line Maria refers to.

²⁵ See above, n. 21.

²⁶ Some five weeks before this letter Maria had professed. On 3 November Gabriel had written W. B. Scott that poor Maggie was “parting with her grayish hair next Sunday, and annexing the kingdom of heaven for good.” William Bell Scott, Autobiographical Notes, 2 vols., ed. W. Minto (1892), ii, 215. On the same day Gabriel sent his “best love to dear Maria” in a letter to his mother, adding the request that she tell Maria “how much I feel with her in this great change to which her lifelong tendencies have pointed from the first” (ii, 320).

²⁷ “Your most kind invitation has met with great success here,” Christina wrote Gabriel on 14 December, “though not (alas!) with good Maria. My Aunts join in love and thanks with Mamma and me, and in the hope of seeing you at Christmas.” Fam. Letters, p. 54. The family Christmas party was held at Aldwick Lodge, near Bognor in Sussex, Gabriel’s temporary residence. He considered it “a real drawback that poor Maria cannot come,” and added, “I grieve to think how lonely she will be on Christmas-day without her family. I do hope she will get some other chance equally desirable of making one in the family-circle; otherwise I should feel quite saddened at being the cause of such a privation to her. She has written me an extremely nice letter, and I shall be answering her without delay” (ii, 324–325).

²⁸ Gabriel’s pet nickname for his mother, an abbreviated form of “Antique.”

²⁹ Maria did spend New Year’s Day with the family at No. 12 Bloomsbury Square, the residence of her two maternal aunts, Eliza and Charlotte Polidori. To the latter Gabriel wrote, “I hope you will be enjoying your New Year’s evening, and above all that good Maria will have some family-pleasures for once. Had she been with us during your stay here, I am sure we should all have valued her company equally” (ii, 326).

³⁰ Gabriel presented his mother with a sealskin coat for Christmas. He ordered a Regent Street shop, to which he had given her “latitude and longitude” to send out three or four for her choice, directing her to be sure to select the “largest, best, and warmest” (ii, 325).

³¹ Possibly some Christmas amusement. The reference is obscure.

³² Gabriel first made the acquaintance of Dizzy, George Hake’s “very intelligent black-and-tan Terrier” at Kelmscott in 1873. He and the Morris children entertained themselves by tormenting Dizzy until the day when the dog, goaded beyond endurance, turned and bit Gabriel across the nose, “at which I am not surprised,” he conceded (ii, 303).

³³ William Graham was one of the principal purchasers of Gabriel’s pictures. It was he who originally suggested to the painter his own poem, The Blessed Damozel, as a subject for the oil-painting with the predella, of which Graham became the owner in 1877. An M. P. from Scotland, Graham placed two of his houses in Perthshire at Gabriel’s disposal during the latter’s convalescence in the summer of 1872. In February 1874 Gabriel reported to his mother that his “good friend Graham has had a severe attack of illness, resulting chiefly I suppose, from over-work, and has not gone in again for Parliament” (ii, 304). By 1879 Graham’s health was so poor that he had lost interest in art-collecting, and by the end of 1880 Gabriel was forced to conclude that des-spite the evidence of his patron’s continuing affection and friendliness, he was “alas no longer a picture-buyer” (ii, 352, 365).

³⁴ Charles Fairfax Murray, the painter and art expert, who owned a number of Rossetti’s paintings. A part of the C. Fairfax Murray collection of manuscripts and first editions was purchased by the University of Texas at the Sotheby sale of 30 May 1961 and added to the large Rossetti collection at the Humanities Research Center there. See The Rossetti-Macmillan Letters, p. 75, n. 1.