Lynda Palazzo (Essay Date Fall 1997)

SOURCE: Palazzo, Lynda. "The Poet and the Bible: Christina Rossetti's Feminist Hermeneutics." The Victorian Newsletter 92 (fall 1997): 6-9.

In the following essay, Palazzo argues that in her religious prose Rossetti attempts to recover for the woman reader the hidden realities in the Christian scriptures and thus that her hermeneutics are feminist.

With the anniversary of Christina Rossetti's death in 1994, there has been renewed interest in her work, with an entire volume of Victorian Poetry devoted to her poetry and prose, revealing a perceptive and sometimes subversive intelligence at work. However, critical accounts of her theology are still very few, and even fewer those which examine the theology of her devotional prose. One of the more promising articles in the volume, Linda Petersen's "Restoring the Book: The Typological Hermeneutics of the PRB," after an exciting introduction suggesting a reaction in Rossetti's theology against...