The Philippine Women’s University
SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
Taft Avenue, Manila
BY: Marimar Q. Pallez
MODERN WORLD POETRY
Minor Poet
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti
He later changed the order of his names to stress his
kinship with the great Italian poet.
Born in London May 12, 1828, to Gabriele and Frances
(Polidori) Rossetti.
He is an Italian patriot exiled from Naples for his political
activity.
A scholar who became professor of Italian at King's
College, London, in 1831.
Mrs. Rossetti was also half-Italian, the children grew up
fluent in both English and Italian.
As part of the large Italian expatriate community in
London, they welcomed other exiles from Mazzini to
organ-grinders; and although they were certainly not
wealthy,
Professor Rossetti was able to support the family comfortably until his eyesight and
general health deteriorated in the 40s.
Dante attended King's College School from 1837 to 1842, when he left to prepare for the
Royal Academy at F. S. Cary's Academy of Art.
In 1846 he was accepted into the Royal Academy but was there only a year before he
became dissatisfied and left to study under Ford Madox Brown.
In 1848 he, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais began to call themselves
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
o This group attracted other young painters, poets, and critics; William Michael
Rossetti acted as secretary and later historian for the group.
In 1849 and 50 D.G.R. exhibited his first important paintings, The Girlhood of Mary
Virgin and Ecce Ancilla Domini (illustration).
At about the same time he met Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a milliner's assistant, who
became a model for many of his paintings and sketches.
They were engaged in 1851 but did not marry until 1860, perhaps because of her ill
health, his financial difficulties, or a simple unwillingness to undertake the commitment.
A commission to cover the walls of the Oxford Debating Union with Arthurian murals
introduced Rossetti to William Morris, Edward Burne-Jones, and A.C. Swinburne in 1856
and 57.
There he also met index Burden, with whom he fell in love, and introduced her to
Morris, whom she married in 1859.
After an engagement lasting nearly ten years, Rossetti and Lizzie Siddal were married
barely 20 months before she died from a self-administered overdose of morphia on
February 10, 1862.
After her death Rossetti moved to 16 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a large house on the
Thames
He continued painting and writing poetry, gaining patrons enough to become relatively
prosperous.
Another of his models, Fanny Cornforth (who appears in Bocca Baciata, The Blue Bower,
and Found), became his mistress and housekeeper, but because of her full-bodied
blondness, never one of his idealized women.
That role was filled first by Lizzie Siddal; occasionally by models like Ruth Herbert and
Annie Miller; but most famously by Janey Morris. Rossetti's choice of models and his
idealization of them helped change the concept of feminine beauty in the Victorian
period to the tall, thin, long-necked, long-haired stunners of frail health that we see in
paintings like Beata Beatrix, Pandora, Proserpine, La Pia, and La Donna della Finestra.
The persistence of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal shows up in photographs of William Butler
Yeats' idealized beauty, Maud Gonne.
Jack Yeats, the father of the poet, was connected with the Pre-Raphaelites, and Yeats
himself said of his younger days, "I was in all things Pre-Raphaelite."
In 1871 Rossetti and Morris leased Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, and Morris visited
Iceland, leaving Rossetti together with Jane and her children.
In the late '60s Rossetti began to suffer from headaches and weakened eyesight, and
began to take chloral mixed with whiskey to cure insomnia.
Chloral accentuated the depression and paranoia latent in Rossetti's nature, and Robert
Buchanan's attack on Rossetti and Swinburne in "The Fleshly School of Poetry" (1871)
changed him completely.
In the summer of 1872 he suffered a mental breakdown, complete with hallucinations
and accusing voices.
He was taken to Scotland, where he attempted suicide, but gradually recovered, and
within a few months was able to paint again.
His health continued to deteriorate slowly (he was still taking chloral), but did not much
interfere with his work.
He died of kidney failure on April 9, 1882
Major Novelist
Charlotte Brontë
Was born in 1816, the third daughter of the Rev. Patrick
Brontë and his wife Maria.
Her brother Patrick Branwell, and her sisters Emily and
Anne
The Brontë family moved to Haworth, Mrs. Brontë dying
the following year.
In 1824 the four eldest Brontë daughters were enrolled
as pupils at the Clergy Daughter's School at Cowan
Bridge. The following year Maria and Elizabeth, the two eldest daughters, became ill,
left the school and died: Charlotte and Emily, understandably, were brought home.
In 1826 Mr. Brontë brought home a box of wooden soldiers for Branwell to play with.
Charlotte, Emily, Branwell, and Ann, playing with the soldiers, conceived of and began
to write in great detail about an imaginary world which they called Angria.
In 1831 Charlotte became a pupil at the school at Roe Head, but she left school the
following year to teach her sisters at home.
She returned returns to Roe Head School in 1835 as a governess: for a time her sister
Emily attended the same school as a pupil, but became homesick and returned to
Haworth. Ann took her place from 1836 to 1837.
In 1838, Charlotte left Roe Head School.
In 1839 she accepted a position as governess in the Sidgewick family, but left after
three months and returned to Haworth.
In 1841 she became governess in the White family, but left, once again, after nine
months.
Upon her return to Haworth the three sisters, led by Charlotte, decided to open their
own school after the necessary preparations had been completed.
In 1842 Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to complete their studies. After a trip
home to Haworth, Charlotte returned alone to Brussels, where she remained until
1844.
Upon her return home the sisters embarked upon their project for founding a school,
which proved to be an abject failure: their advertisements did not elicit a single
response from the public.
The following year Charlotte discovered Emily's poems, and decided to publish a
selection of the poems of all three sisters: 1846 brought the publication of their Poems,
written under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Charlotte also completed The Professor, which was rejected for publication.
The following year, however, Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights, and
Ann’s Agnes Grey were all published, still under the Bell pseudonyms.
In 1848 Charlotte and Ann visited their publishers in London, and revealed the true
identities of the "Bells." In the same year Branwell Brontë, by now an alcoholic and a
drug addict, died, and Emily died shortly thereafter. Ann died the following year.
In 1849 Charlotte, visiting London, began to move in literary circles, making the
acquaintance, for example, of Thackeray.
In 1850 Charlotte edited her sister's various works, and met Mrs. Gaskell.
In 1851she visited the Great Exhibition in London, and attended a series of lectures
given by Thackeray.
The Rev. A. B. Nicholls, curate of Haworth since 1845, proposed marriage to Charlotte in
1852. The Rev. Mr. Brontë objected violently, and Charlotte, who, though she may have
pitied him, was in any case not in love with him, refused him. Nicholls left Haworth in
the following year, the same in which Charlotte's Villette was published.
By 1854, however, Mr. Brontë's opposition to the proposed marriage had weakened,
and Charlotte and Nicholls became engaged. Nicholls returned as curate at Haworth,
and they were married, though it seems clear that Charlotte, though she admired him,
still did not love him.
In 1854 Charlotte, expecting a child, caught pneumonia. It was an illness which could
have been cured, but she seems to have seized upon it (consciously or unconsciously)
as an opportunity of ending her life, and after a lengthy and painful illness, she died,
probably of dehydration.
1857 saw the postumous publication of The Professor, which had been written in 1845-
46, and in that same year Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë was published.
RETRIEVED FROM:
Glenn Everett, PhD (1988)http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dgr/dgrseti13.html
David Cody (1987) http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/cbronte/brontbio.html
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/dante-gabriel-rossetti
http://www.biography.com/people/charlotte-bront%C3%AB-11919959
