I’ve read three novels by D.M. Denton, and although I liked the other two, A House Near Luccoli, To a Strange Somewhere Fled and Without the Veil Between, The Dove Upon Her Branch is my favorite of her novels so far. I had a little trouble getting into the pace of the novel reading the first chapter. Whether it was the mood I was in the day I started it or the kind of difficulty I get into when I start to read Proust with his minute details, at first the action seemed to move a little too slowly. But then my awareness of what Denton was doing shifted, and from then on, I became increasingly engrossed in the everyday details of Christina Rossetti and her family’s lives. I ended up loving the novel.
The Rosetti’s as a family were one of the more interesting literary phenomena of the mid to late 1800s. The father, an Italian poet and political activist who was exiled to England, was, in addition to his reputation as a poet, a major Dante scholar and teacher of the Italian language at King’s College. Of the children of Gabriele and Francis Polideri Rossetti, three made significant contributions to the arts in England. Maria, the oldest daughter, wrote a significant book on Dante, several highly regarded religious books, and translated books from Italian; Dante Gabriel was one of the most important artists and poets of the age, and Christina was considered at the time the heir to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the great English poet married to the equally famous poet Robert Browning.
The Dove Upon Her Branch is the story of Christina who wrote both children’s poetry and poetry for adults. Before she succumbed to the illness that eventually took her life, there was some assumption that she would be the Poet Laureate of England after Tennyson gave up the post, but her illness kept that from happening.
All the family members as well as most of the important poets, writers, thinkers, and artists of the age populate Denton novel’s pages. Dante Gabriel and his sometimes-notorious exploits as the leading Pre-Raphaelite artist certainly add a spice to our understanding of this age in contrast to the usual vision conjured by the words the Victorian age with its sober, conservative queen. Christina herself, with her insecurities and her somewhat amazing strength as a woman in an era where women were expected to take a secondary role, comes across in the novel as someone who, as hesitant as she sometimes could be, is an independent thinker and spirit who never married and lived life as she thought it should be lived.
What made the novel important to me, however, was the amazing amount of detail about the Rossetti household and the milieu in which the family lived that Denton conjures, partially from research and partially from her imagination. This is not a book where Indiana Jones is racing through a tunnel as a rolling boulder hurtles toward him as he tries to escape certain death, but it is a tapestry of life as it was lived in the 1800s that had a different pace from the frenetic pace of our century with the explosion of change drive by technology and an ever-expanding global civilization.
I think there is always value at examining the lives of people like Christina Rossetti to see what the wellsprings of extraordinary creativity truly are. Christina Rosetti’s poetry, especially her children’s poems, still represent some of the most extraordinary poetry ever written by an English poet. But there is also value in understanding the context of a time through the details of the lives lived during that time. I am just glad that I have read Denton’s latest novel.
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Martin Shone
A breath of bookish history
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2024