That Christina Rossetti was read and admired by Virginia Woolf (see her 1930 essay I am Christina Rossetti, published in The Common Reader – Second Series), comes as no surprise to me, but a recent chance reading of “Goblin Market”, written in 1859 and first published in 1862, made me wonder at just how much Rossetti’s poetry, and this poem in particular, may have influenced her; how lasting the effect of the powerful imagery, first encountered and internalized I assume in her childhood.
Growing up as she did in the often suffocating closeness and dark of the Victorian patriarchy (exemplified by a domineering father, adored and loathed in equal measure though he was), the manipulative seductions of the goblins would have surely resonated with the young Virginia. And I discern the alliterative quality of the names of Rossetti’s lyrical sisters, Laura and Lizzie, to find echo in those of the Stephen sisters – Vanessa and Virginia. Here, a very different closeness, a symbiosis of sorts. It seems more than presumptuous to proclaim too loudly, and with scant evidence, upon the intimate relationship between the Stephen sisters; suffice to say Virginia has left a written record that says enough to understand as well as one might the intensity of their bond.
...Golden head by golden head, Like two pigeons in one nest Folded in each other’s wings, They lay down in their curtain’d bed: Like two blossoms on one stem, Like two flakes of new-fall’n snow, Like two wands of ivory ... -"Goblin Market" Christina Rossetti (1862)
Light and lighthouses! That fabled lighthouse from Cornwall summers of childhood looms large in Virginia Woolf’s writing; in the opening passages of Jacob’s Room (1922) or relocated to the Hebrides in To the Lighthouse (1927) in which the symbolism of uprightness, of solidity of structure and guiding force is being re-imagined and imbued in the character of Mrs. Ramsey (and as Woolf so remembered in her mother). Memories of her childhood flood the writer Woolf like beacons of light, but is she also thinking about Rossetti’s narrative poem?
...White and golden Lizzie stood, Like a lily in a flood,— Like a rock of blue-vein’d stone Lash’d by tides obstreperously,— Like a beacon left alone In a hoary roaring sea, Sending up a golden fire,— Like a fruit-crown’d orange-tree White with blossoms honey-sweet Sore beset by wasp and bee,— Like a royal virgin town Topp’d with gilded dome and spire Close beleaguer’d by a fleet Mad to tug her standard down... - "Goblin Market" Christina Rossetti (1862)
National Portrait Gallery, London
I imagine – and it is not difficult to do – the child Virginia reading Rossetti’s poem or, better still, cuddled close in bed with her sister being read to by their beautiful, stern – and distant – mother; and always longing to be just a little more like a Lizzie, as a sister like Lizzie – or Vanessa – all that purity, that strength, all that love and sacrifice; rather than the forever searching, inquiring Laura – or self – surely destined to be set adrift on treacherous seas, a shipwreck waiting to happen. And, then, as a woman and as a writer to imagine in Lily Briscoe a composite character of sorts of the sisters; there to observe and to compose; to harness all the memories, with brush in hand to dab at her palette and bring to canvas all the colour and shadings of life and love, of family. As she, Virginia, would do with pen and ink. The Stephens, the Ramseys, Laura and Lizzie, goblins aplenty – a post-impressionist painting or a modernist novel – where the real is memory and light is dark and the other way round, and the boundaries more than just blurred.
–Anne Dromache, March 25th 2019.