She broke off two engagements rather than compromise her soul—then spent her life writing poetry about women who died for love.

London, 1850.

Christina Rossetti was twenty years old when James Collinson proposed. He was handsome, talented, part of her brother's artistic circle. She said yes.

Then he converted back to Catholicism.

Christina was devoutly Anglo-Catholic—similar to Catholicism, but crucially, definitively different. She believed the theological distinctions mattered. Not just to her faith, but to her eternal soul.

She broke the engagement.

Her family was shocked. Her mother worried she'd never get another chance. Victorian women who refused marriage proposals—especially for religious reasons—were considered fanatics. Spinsters. Women who'd chosen God because no man would have them.

Christina didn't care what people thought. She cared about the state of her soul before God.

Eight years later, another proposal. Charles Bagot Cayley—a brilliant linguist, kind, genuinely devoted to her. He translated Dante. He understood her literary mind. He loved her poetry.

But he was an agnostic. He couldn't, in good conscience, claim to believe in God.

Christina loved him. By all accounts, this was the deepest romantic attachment of her life. She was thirty-four years old—well past the age Victorian society considered marriageable. This might be her last chance at conventional happiness.

She said no.

Again.

And then she went home and wrote some of the most achingly beautiful love poetry in the English language—all about women who couldn't have what they wanted. Women who chose death over compromise. Women who waited, unfulfilled, for something that would never come.

"Remember me when I am gone away, / Gone far away into the silent land..."

Christina Rossetti was born in 1830 into a family of Italian political exiles living in London. Her father was a Dante scholar. Her brother Dante Gabriel became a famous Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet. The house was full of art, literature, passionate conversation.

But while her brothers pursued fame and lived dramatically—love affairs, artistic movements, bohemian scandal—Christina turned inward.

She modeled for her brother's paintings when she was young. In one famous image, she's the Virgin Mary in "Ecce Ancilla Domini" (Behold the Handmaid of the Lord)—looking pale, withdrawn, almost trapped by the annunciation. It's haunting how much that painting captures Christina herself: a woman chosen for a divine purpose she didn't entirely want but felt compelled to accept.

In her twenties, she began publishing poetry. Not the grand, sweeping epics Victorian men wrote, but something quieter. More dangerous.

In 1862, she published "Goblin Market and Other Poems."

"Goblin Market" reads like a children's fairy tale at first. Two sisters, Laura and Lizzie. Goblin merchants selling magical fruit. But as you read deeper, the eroticism becomes unmistakable:

"She kissed and kissed her with a hungry mouth."

The poem is about temptation. About a woman who tastes forbidden fruit and becomes addicted, wasting away, dying from unfulfilled craving. About her sister who risks everything to save her—literally offering her own body to the goblins, letting their juices run down her face so her sister can taste and be healed.

It's about salvation through sisterhood. About female desire and its dangers. About addiction, ruin, and redemptive love.

Victorian critics praised it as a charming children's poem. They completely missed—or deliberately ignored—the sexual undercurrents, the homoeroticism, the suggestion that women's salvation might come from each other rather than from men.

Christina let them think it was innocent. She knew what she'd written.

She spent the rest of her life producing poetry that seemed simple on the surface but pulsed with suppressed passion underneath. Poems about women who died young. Women who waited for lovers who never came. Women who chose spiritual devotion over earthly fulfillment.

"When I am dead, my dearest, / Sing no sad songs for me..."

Her devotional poetry was equally intense. She didn't write comfortable Christianity. She wrote about spiritual agony. About the pain of trying to love God when your body wants earthly things. About the anguish of denying yourself in hope of heavenly reward.

She knew intimately what she was writing about.

By her thirties, Christina had developed Graves' disease—a thyroid condition that made her physically unwell, changed her appearance, deepened her sense of being separated from normal life. She suffered from depression. She spent long periods in seclusion.

But she kept writing.

She wrote devotional works that showed no easy answers. She wrote "Time Flies: A Reading Diary"—365 meditations on death, suffering, and faith that are beautiful and deeply unsettling.

She wrote children's poetry that seemed sweet but often had dark edges.

And she kept writing about love—always unfulfilled, always sacrificed, always just out of reach.

Here's what makes Christina's life achingly poignant:

She chose this. She wasn't forced into spinsterhood by lack of options. She had proposals. She had men who loved her. She could have married, had children, lived a conventional Victorian woman's life.

She chose God instead. Chose spiritual integrity over earthly comfort. Chose to live with unfulfilled longing rather than compromise what she believed was her eternal soul.

And then she channeled all that denied passion into poetry.

Every woman in her poems who dies for love, who wastes away from unsatisfied desire, who chooses death over dishonor—those are versions of Christina herself. She was writing her own buried life in metaphor.

"Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad."

In her later years, as illness worsened, Christina's poetry became even more focused on death. Not morbidly, but almost longingly. Death as release. Death as the end of impossible choices. Death as finally being able to rest.

She died in 1894 at age sixty-four, of breast cancer. She was buried modestly, without fanfare.

For decades, she was largely forgotten. When people studied Victorian poetry, they read Tennyson, Browning, her brother Dante Gabriel. Christina was a footnote—"lady poet," "devotional writer," safely categorized and dismissed.

It took until the 1970s for feminist literary critics to rediscover her work and recognize what had always been there: Christina Rossetti was one of the greatest English poets of the 19th century, writing with psychological complexity and emotional depth that most of her male contemporaries couldn't match.

She'd hidden revolution in religious poetry. She'd disguised eroticism as fairy tales. She'd written the inner lives of women who had no acceptable way to express what they felt.

And she'd done it all while living the contradiction herself—a woman of intense passion who chose intense restraint. Who felt everything and denied herself almost everything.

Think about the courage that required.

She could have married James Collinson. Plenty of interfaith marriages survived theological differences. But Christina believed those differences mattered for eternity, and she refused to gamble her soul for earthly comfort.

She could have married Charles Cayley. He would have made her happy. But she couldn't marry someone who didn't share her faith, couldn't build a life with someone whose eternal destination might be separate from hers.

So she lived alone. Wrote alone. Suffered alone.

And created poetry that speaks directly to anyone who's ever felt torn between what they want and what they believe is right. Between earthly desire and spiritual calling. Between the life they could have and the life they must choose.

Christina Rossetti proved that you don't have to live a conventional life to write about love. Sometimes the deepest understanding of longing comes from denying yourself what you long for.

Her poetry doesn't resolve into easy comfort. It sits in the aching space between wanting and having, between body and soul, between this world and the next.

Because that's where Christina lived her entire life.

In the tension. In the contradiction. In the beautiful, agonizing space between.

She refused marriage twice for her soul's sake. She wrote poetry that made those refusals immortal.

And she proved that a woman's denied passion, transformed into art, can outlive every conventional happiness she might have chosen instead.

"Remember me when I am gone away..."

We do, Christina. We remember. Because you wrote the longing you couldn't live, and made it eternal.

{PS}