One of the most beloved songs of the Christmas season, a favorite of choir directors, was written by a woman whose life was full of suffering.
“In the Bleak Midwinter” is considered by choirmasters as the world’s greatest Christmas carol, noted Liberty University professor Karen Swallow Prior, writing in The Gospel Coalition Saturday. But the lyrics of this song were not set to music until 12 years after the death of the poet who penned them.
Born to Italian parents in England, poet Christina Rossetti is the author of “A Christmas Carol,” which was later titled “In the Bleak Midwinter,” and was first published in 1872 in Scribner’s Monthly, an American journal. Rossetti grew up in a family that valued the arts, her father a scholar of Dante. Her two older brothers helped form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an arts community comprised of English painters, poets, and critics, which was founded in 1848.
Prior noted in her essay that one of Rossetti’s brothers famously said his sister was “replete with the spirit of self-postponement.” Some critics of Rossetti have described her as a “nun of art.”
“Schooled at home by her Anglican mother, Rossetti declined two offers of marriage due to doctrinal scruples and remained single her entire life. She devoted herself to her family and her faith, ministering to former prostitutes and working with the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, as well as nurturing a vibrant inner life as a poet.”
Rosetti wrote to her brothers in 1888: “Beautiful, delightful, noble, memorable, as is the world you and yours frequent, I yet am…
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