'Writing to his sister on 11 January 1892 ... [Walter Raleigh] declared: "I have been reading Christina Rossetti -- three or four of her poems, like those of her brother, make a cheap fool of [Robert] Browning ... I think she is the best poet alive."'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Walter Raleigh Print: Book
'While his widowed mother... worked a market stall, Ralph Finn scrambled up the scholarship ladder to Oxford University. He credited his success largely to his English master at Davenant Foundation School: "When I was an East End boy searching for beauty, hardly knowing what I was searching for, fighting against all sorts of bad beginnings and unrewarding examples, he more than anyone taught me to love our tremndous heritage of English language and literature". And Finnn never doubted that it was HIS heritage: "My friends and companions Tennyson, Browning, Keats, Shakespeare, Francis Thompson, Donne, Housman, the Rosettis. All as alive to me as thought they had been members of my family". After all, as he was surprised and pleased to discover, F.T. Palgrave (whose Golden Treasury he knew thoroughly) was part-Jewish'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ralph Finn Print: Book
'As to what they read [at the Gower Street School in the 1880s] -- and [...] Lucy Harrison [headmistress] read aloud to them untiringly -- it must be what went deepest and lifted highest -- Shakespeare, Dante in Cary's translation, Blake, Wordsworth, and [...] [Miss Harrison's] own favourites, Emily Bronte, Christina Rossetti, the Brownings, Coventry Patmore [...] A reading which all [...] [Miss Harrison's] pupils heard often, and never forgot, was from Alice Meynell's "Preludes" of 1875 -- the sonnet "To a Daisy"'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lucy Harrison, headmistress, Charlotte Mew, and other pupils at Gower Street school Print: Book
Virginia Stephen to Violet Dickinson, 25 December 1906:
'I am reading now a book by Renan called his Memories of Childhood [Cahiers de Jeunesse,
1906]: O my word it is beautiful -- like the chime of silver bells [...] Also I am reading my
dear Christina Rossetti [...] the first of our English poetesses [...] Then I am reading your
Keats, with the pleasure of one handling great luminous stones. I rise and shout in ecstacy,
and my eyes brim with such pleasure that I must drop the book and gaze from the window. It
is a beautiful edition.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Stephen Print: Book
'Sydney shaped Larkin's taste skilfully, leading him away from J.C. Powys and towards Llewelyn and T.F., towards James Joyce with no expectation that he would enjoy him, and towards poets who would remain favourites all his life: Hardy, Christina Rossetti and A.E. Housman. In late 1939, when Larkin discovered T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Edward Upward and Christopher Isherwood, Sydney also encouraged him - continuing, as he had always done, to make reading seem an independent activity, only tenuously linked to schoolwork.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Book
