The House of Life by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Sonnet-Sequence

New and definitive edition of Rossetti's masterpiece, with full notes and apparatus. Described by W.S. Blunt as 'the greatest of the all the great Victorian poems', this sequence of 103 sonnets was composed between 1847 and 1881, and finally published complete in Ballads and Sonnets just six months before Rossetti's death. These passionate celebrations of the ecstasy of love threatened by change and Fate inspired the Aesthetes and Decadents of the eighties and nineties, leading to Walter Pater's