The Rossettis were one of the most remarkable and talented families in Victorian Britain. Of the two parents and three siblings, Dante Gabriel (1828 82) and Christina (1830 94) stood out, but throughout their lives they remained a tightly-knit unit. William Michael (1829 1919), who published this two-volume work in 1895, was the family record keeper and in the memoir of his brother we have an unmatched account of the family dynamic. He was not always candid about his brother's affairs but his biography is unparalleled for its fresh directness. Unlike all subsequent biographers, William wrote...

The Rossettis were one of the most remarkable and talented families in Victorian Britain. Of the two parents and three siblings, Dante Gabriel (1828 82) and Christina (1830 94) stood out, but throughout their lives they remained a tightly-knit unit. William Michael (1829 1919), who published this two-volume work in 1895, was the family record keeper and in the memoir of his brother we have an unmatched account of the family dynamic. He was not always candid about his brother's affairs but his biography is unparalleled for its fresh directness. Unlike all subsequent biographers, William wrote...

John William Polidori (1795-1821) was, for a brief period, the personal physician to Lord Byron. Half Italian, he was the uncle of the Rossetti siblings, and it was William Michael Rossetti, in his role as family recorder, who published Polidori's manuscript diary after nearly a century, in 1911. This account of his time with Byron (which ended two months later when they quarrelled and parted company) is the only contemporary account of the few weeks, crucial to the development of the Romantic movement, during which Mary Shelley's Frankenstein arose from a storytelling competition at the...