Victorian Love and Loss: Rossetti's "Remember" and Hardy's "The Ruined Maid"

The Victorian period (1837–1901) brought new pressures to bear on love poetry. The rigid social codes governing gender, sexuality, and respectability created a culture of surfaces — of what could be said and what must remain hidden. Christina Rossetti and Thomas Hardy both wrote against these constraints, though in very different ways. Rossetti's "Remember" is a quiet, devastating sonnet in which a dying woman instructs her lover on how to grieve; Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" is a savagely ironic dialogue that exposes the hypocrisy of Victorian sexual morality.

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Rossetti: "Remember"

Context

Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was one of the most important poets of the Victorian period. She was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle (her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) and a devout Anglo-Catholic whose faith shaped every aspect of her life and work. She twice refused proposals of marriage on religious grounds.