Christina Rossetti was born in London, the youngest of four children of Gabriele Rossetti, an Italian poet and political exile who taught Italian at King’s College. It was a household of talk, books and art. Her brother Dante Gabriel became a famous painter and poet, and helped found the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; her brother William Michael became a critic and her editor; her sister Maria became an Anglican nun.

Christina began writing poems as a child, and her grandfather printed some on his own press when she was a teenager. She was deeply religious, and her faith shaped her life. She turned down two men who proposed to her, at least in part because of differences in belief, and for years she volunteered at a home for women trying to leave prostitution.

In 1862 she published Goblin Market and Other Poems, with illustrations by Dante Gabriel. The title poem tells of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, and the goblin men who sell them enchanted fruit at dusk. Laura eats and begins to waste away; Lizzie goes to the goblins to save her. The poem’s rhymes run and tumble like the goblins themselves, and readers have found in it everything from a fairy tale to a story about temptation, addiction, desire and the love between sisters.

Much of her other poetry is quieter, and full of longing and death: “Remember me when I am gone away,” one sonnet begins, then asks to be forgotten if remembering would make the beloved sad. She wrote poems for children too, in Sing-Song (1872).

Around 1872 she also wrote a short poem for a Christmas issue of a magazine, beginning “In the bleak mid-winter / Frosty wind made moan.” After her death it was set to music by Gustav Holst, and later by Harold Darke, and it has become one of the most loved carols in English. It ends not with angels or kings but with a question every giver knows: what can I give him, poor as I am? The answer is “my heart.” She died in London in December 1894.