![on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/ce/94/8c/ce948cef4f19816d5366ac8b10844337.jpg)
The astonishing productivity of Rossetti's writing life remains largely hidden, except when she speaks directly with her publisher, receives advice from her brothers on negotiating a contract, or debates with Dante Gabriel about revisions to the texts of poems.
![on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti](https://i.pinimg.com/236x/4e/4f/7b/4e4f7bbcefb768970ce1991f7b52a30b--labyrinth-movie-jim-henson.jpg)
Rossetti's life was dominated by recurrent rhythms and these are evident in her letters: the discipline of liturgical life in her Anglo-Catholic parish church Christmas visits to Dante Gabriel summer vacations, preferably by the sea regular outings to the Heimans and games of backgammon, dominoes, and cribbage with the older women in the evening. There are discoveries and moments of self-revelation in these letters, but Rossetti is not the kind of writer readily to oblige voyeuristic interest. As a result, as reviews of volume 1 in Harrison's edition of The Letters of Christina Rossetti demonstrated, Rossetti's guarded "epistolary style" disappointed readers who had evidently been anticipating disclosures, secrets, or confessions.
#ON THE STROKE OF MIDNIGHT CHRISTINA ROSSETTI FULL#
When she is not politely and dutifully reporting on family activities, Rossetti simply omits giving news since she would soon be able to have "a full chat" (p. However, Rossetti's long friendship with Amelia Heiman does not yield the intimate admissions that might be expected.
![on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti on the stroke of midnight christina rossetti](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/aowAAOSwNIZfNuTZ/s-l640.png)
For example, The Rossetti Family Letters to the Heiman Family (Princeton University Library) are a large accession of correspondence that became available just in time for Harrison to include them. In addition, besides making it a principle to destroy incoming letters once they had been answered, Rossetti was often obliged to write letters that are documents of purely social etiquette and niceties. is less animated and discursive than that of the magnificent letter writers of her century: Keats, Byron, Carlyle, Barrett Browning, and Swinburne, for example" (p. The result, as Antony Harrison admits in his note on "Editorial Procedures," is that her "epistolary style. Like so much of her poetry and prose, Christina Rossetti's letters are marked by control and restraint. Such a well-documented case history raises questions about how writing may be shaped by paradigms of illness that are not accessible to the conscious mind. This essay explores the parallels between literary and somatic metaphors: Rossetti’s body and art are often simultaneously “saying” the same thing, the physical symptoms expressing somatically the same dynamic that is expressed in metaphor and narrative in Rossetti’s creative writing. When the crisis had passed, Rossetti’s writing began to include new rhetoric and imagery of self-acceptance and of suffering as a means of spiritual improvement. Interestingly, these creative representations reflect an understanding of this disease process that Rossetti family documents and the history of Victorian medicine demonstrate Rossetti could not have been aware of. Rossetti, her family, and her doctors understood Graves’ disease as a heart condition however, Rossetti’s writing reflects a different paradigm, presenting themes of self-attack and a divided self that uncannily parallel the modern understanding of Graves’ disease as autoimmune in nature. Victorian poet Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was frequently troubled by poor health, and her mid-life episode of life-threatening illness (1870–1872) when she suffered from Graves’ disease provides an illuminating case study of the ways that illness can be reflected in poetry and prose.