I remember well a conversation I had about Christina Rossetti’s poem In the Bleak Mid-winterover twenty years ago.  I was an earnest young Christian undergraduate reading English Literature.  I had just “discovered” Rossetti, and was planning to write my dissertation on her poetry.  Talking with another earnest young Christian undergraduate of my acquaintance, I described Rossetti as an important Victorian religious writer. “What did she write?” he asked. My first thought was to mention In the Bleak Mid-winter, probably her best-known work owing to its having been memorably set to music as a Christmas carol by Gustav Holst. But this was a mistake […]