Christina Rossetti was born in London, England, in December 1830 and died in London in December 1894. Although she was of Italian descent, Rossetti never lived outside Great Britain because her father had moved to London where he was a professor of Italian at King's College. Rossetti's mother was also a teacher, and she schooled her own children at home. All four Rossetti children were artistically inclined—the two sons, William Michael and Dante Gabriel, were poets and painters; the older daughter, Maria, was a writer; and the youngest, Christina, became one of Victorian England's most prominent poets of both adult and children's verse.

Her brother, Dante Gabriel, probably had the greatest influence on Rossetti's early work. Dante was one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an artistic group whose objective was to recapture the more natural creative spirit of art before the renowned Renaissance painter Raphael...