Born in 1830, Christina Rossetti began composing verse at the age of eleven and continued to write for the remaining fifty-three years of her life. By the time of her death in 1894, Christina had written more than eleven hundred poems and had published over nine hundred of them. Publication of Volume III of The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti brings to a conclusion the first definitive, variorum edition of the poems of this greatest woman poet of the Victorian Age.
R.W. Crump divides the final volume, containing the poems Christina did not include in her published collections of verse, into three main sections. In the first are those poems Christina published separately in anthologies, periodicals, or her own prose works, such as Commonplace, and Other Short Stories. The second group consists of privately printed poems, including, most notably, those from the 1847 Verses: Dedicated to Her Mother. The extant poems that Christina never published make up the third and by far largest section of Volume III. Crump’s voluminous textual notes and appendixes give the variant readings and provide additional information on the poems.
A special feature of Volume III is the incorporation of the texts of poems in the hitherto unknown 375-page Verses manuscript of 1893, a major discovery made since Volume II was published in 1986. Some of the material in the appendixes updates the first two volumes in light of this discovery.
