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The Josephine Hart Poetry
Hour, founded by the novelist
(Damage, Sin, The Truth About
Love) and poetry anthologist
Josephine Hart, has presented
great poetry read by great actors
for almost 30 years at many
prestigious venues including the
National Theatre, The Donmar
and the British Library.
During the events, Josephine
introduced the life and work of
each poet as, like TS Eliot, she
believed that “we understand the
work better when we understand
something of the poet’s life.”
Sadly, Josephine passed away
suddenly in June 2011, but her
widower Maurice Saatchi set
up The Josephine Hart Poetry
Foundation to carry on her
pioneering work of bringing
poetry in performance to a broad
public audience.
“After the success of the
Foundation’s partnership
with Mayfair Times in launching
the inaugural Mayfair & St
James’s Literary Festival last
year, we are delighted to be
back for what promises to be
another very exciting festival,”
says Shevaun Wilder, director
of The Josephine Hart Poetry
Foundation and artistic director
of the Mayfair & St James’s
Literary Festival.For full listings, visit mayfairtimes.
co.uk/category/literary-festivalCHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894), one of
the finest poets of the 19th century, was born
in Fitzrovia, the youngest of four talented
brothers and sisters. Her elder siblings were
Maria, a biographer of Dante; William, an art
and literary critic; and Dante Gabriel, artist,
poet and co-founder of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood.
Three of their grandparents were Italian.
Both their maternal grandfather, Gaetano
Polidori, and their father, Gabriele Rossetti
- who later became professor of Italian
at King’s College London – were political
refugees.
Two lasting inf luences on Rossetti were
her mother Frances’ religiosity and the love
of nature she discovered “prowling” her
grandfather’s cottage-garden.
In her early teens she had a nervous
breakdown but, by 17, had two poems
published in the prestigious literary weekly,
The Athenaeum. She fell in love with artist
James Collinson around this time and
Charles Cayley 10 years later but renounced
both in favour of her Tractarian faith.
To wit, Josephine Hart quotes Virginia
Woolf, who said that if she were “bringing a
case against God”, Christina Rossetti would
be her first witness.
In 1862, aged 32, Rossetti’s debut
collection Goblin Market and Other Poems
was published by Macmillan.
Goblin Market is a sensuous, rhythmic
tale of the temptation and redemption of two
sisters, Laura and Lizzie, variously seen as a
battle of the divided self, a story of addiction
and recovery or a ref lection on the plight of
“fallen women”.
There followed The Prince’s Progress
(1866), A Pageant (1881) and The Face of the
Deep (1882).
Over half of Rossetti’s poems are
devotional and express a belief in reward in
the afterlife, as in her vision of death in Urbs
Beata:
“To have my part with all the saints,
And with my God.”
Rossetti died of breast cancer aged 64, and
is buried in her parents’ grave in Highgate
Cemetery.