Kathleen Jones

Christina was the youngest of the four Rossetti children, born in England to Italian parents. Although she and her brother, the artist Dante Gabriel, were known as the 'two storms', Christina's passionate nature was curbed in a way that her brothers was not, as she submitted to the social and religious pressures that lay so heavily on Victorian women. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she suffered the tyranny of a loving family. Her sister Maria's...

The Lake Poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey, have become a literary myth and we are used to looking at the Lake District landscape through its romantic prism. But for their sisters, wives and daughters the view was very different. The Wordsworths lived at Grasmere, the Coleridges and Southeys twelve-miles away at Keswick and the women created a kind of extended family that kept the group together long after the men had ceased to be friends....