Note 21, Chapter 5 of the author's Christina Rossetti in Context which the University of North Carolina Press published in 1988. It appears in the Victorian web with the kind permission of the author, who of course retains copyright.
In a letter to his sister dated 7 September 1881, Dante Rossetti describes Swinburne's reaction to A Pageant and Other Poems, in which Monna Innominata first appeared: "Swinburne's delight with the [volume] amounted to a dancing and screaming ecstacy" (Doughty and Wall, Letters of D. G. Rossetti, 4:1920). It is clear that Christina read Swinburne's poetry with some care. See FL, 120, and Packer, Christina Rossetti, 353.
Last modified 24 June 2007