For readers who are drawn to the complex interplay of text and image in Victorian aesthetics, this beautiful edition offers a wealth of fascinating images. Editors Susan Owens and Nicholas Tromans bring together a collection of richly illustrated essays that aim to articulate Christina Rossetti's complicated relationship to the visual arts and the legacy of paintings, photographs, and illustrations that she (both her poetry and her person) inspired. Rossetti is an apt choice for a project of this scope: as Tromans argues, “Rarely, if ever, has a major poet grown up so deeply embedded in an avant-garde visual culture” (28). Examining Rossetti's life and work through the lens of visual art allows Owens and Tromans to explore a wide range of topics related to Victorian art and design, from the Pre-Raphaelite movement to children's literature to devotional prose and poetry. Yet while Rossetti's creative life was one in which “literature was the warp and visual art the weft,” Owens and Tromans are equally interested in acknowledging the poet's “Protestant suspicion” of visual art (12, 20). How does one reconcile Rossetti's involvement in this rich artistic tradition with her famous stance of renunciation? This is a familiar question to scholars of Rossetti, and the answers provided here remain somewhat exploratory. As a whole, though, Owens and Tromans seem less interested in advancing new arguments about Rossetti's role in Victorian literary and artistic culture than in contextualizing and illustrating that role. To that end, the volume provides an excellent introduction to Rossetti's remarkable visual world.

Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art is a timely contribution, adding to an array of recent publications that seek to investigate the cultural, religious, and scientific contexts of the Pre-Raphaelites (see, for example, Emma Mason's Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith and John Holmes's The Pre-Raphaelites and Science, both published in 2018). Most of the collection's contributors are curators and art historians, and the collection draws intelligently on scholarship from a number of related fields, including literary studies and book history. Owens and Tromans organize each of the five substantial chapters around a particular facet of Rossetti's relationship to the visual arts. In chapter 1, Tromans focuses on Rossetti's pictorial aesthetic and her conflicted attitude toward visual art, informed at once by the Pre-Raphaelites and by her Tractarian faith; Owens in chapter 2 surveys paintings, drawings, and photographs of the poet herself; in chapter 3, Dinah Roe examines Rossetti's hand-penciled illustrations to her sister's edition of John Keble's The Christian Year; Stephen Calloway traces Rossetti's relationships with her publishers and illustrators in chapter 4; and in chapter 5, Hilary Underwood joins Owens and Tromans in an exploration of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic responses to Rossetti's poetry.

As this brief synopsis conveys, Rossetti herself appears in multiple guises here: poet, amateur artist, and model. This wide-angle lens feels at times unfocused; do portraits of the artist tell us the same things, or tell them in the same way, as do portraits by the artist? At times, too, the analysis is hampered by speculative language (“Did Christina herself prefer to be depicted in profile?” [46]) and overly broad claims (“Rossetti's inward-looking and arresting verse offered endless scope for an artist to forge their own visions” [166]). This is perhaps because Owens and Tromans are ultimately most interested in compiling and contextualizing scholarship for the general reader. The volume is especially indebted to Lorraine Janzen Kooistra's Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History (2002), which similarly explored Rossetti's visual imagination and traced the history of illustrations of her published poetry. A more exhaustive scholarly project, Kooistra's work is referenced throughout Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art, as it should be (especially the chapters on illustration, where the two books most directly overlap). Owens and Tromans's volume lacks Kooistra's attentiveness to the changing sociohistorical contexts that impact both the production and reception of books over time; Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art can only glance at some of the historical material that Kooistra explores at length. What Owens and Tromans do add to Kooistra's account is a more expansive view of Rossetti's relationship to the visual arts.

It is this expansive view, and the wide-ranging collection of images it addresses, that makes this volume valuable at once to general readers and to Rossetti scholars. The two hundred illustrations, many full-page and many in color, range from reproductions of Rossetti's own drawings to photographs of the remarkable bindings for the early editions of her books (designed by her brother Dante Gabriel) to prints of artworks known to be owned by Rossetti herself. The collection of illustrations heightens the sense of complexity that the editors work to underscore: Rossetti's surprisingly apocalyptic pencil drawings (not often reproduced) are even more striking when viewed in contrast to the sensuous portraits painted by her brother and the placid print of Christ by Frederic Shields that, we learn, was one of the poet's favorite images (18). And there's much that will spark the interest of future researchers here, especially the high-quality reproductions of Rossetti's illustrations to The Christian Year. In short, Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art reads like an intimate conversation with a group of expert curators—a guided tour into the rich visual world of Rossetti and her Victorian circle.