This mundane analysis of an exquisite work of art does reveal its author’s emotional pattern. It is known that Miss Rossetti had a somewhat cloistered life, largely spent in the company of a mother to whom she was intensely devoted and a sister who later became an Anglican nun, all three women being almost fanatically devout. She was twice passionately in love with men, but refused them both on the grounds of religious incompatibility. The first of these episodes occurred when she was barely seventeen. The man, a recent convert to Catholicism, returned to the Church of England when he discovered that Christina would not marry a papist, but later reverted to Rome, and the whole affair seems to have constituted a two-year span of acute emotional disturbance in the girl’s life. (She subsequently fainted upon meeting him unexpectedly in the street.) It may well have been that any man’s ability to switch religious camps so readily under the stress of passion produced a reaction to the whole business of sex such as we find in _Goblin Market_, which was written when its author was nearing thirty. Tragically enough, her lifelong ascetic repression broke during her last illness in a protracted delirium which revealed at what cost it had been maintained. * * * * * France was as always more tolerant of sexual latitude in literature than England, but even there the open-mindedness which made _Mlle de Maupin_ acceptable in 1835 was not constant. Since it is impossible to give in short compass any account of the alternating waves of liberalism and conservative reaction that swayed public opinion there during the middle decades of the century, it must suffice to note that Charles Baudelaire published his _Fleurs du Mal_ during an interim of clerical dominance, and in consequence the volume was condemned by the _Tribunal Correctionnel_ in August 1857. As early as 1846 the publisher Levy had announced on advertising pages of other works a forthcoming title by Baudelaire, _Les Lesbiennes_,[43] which never appeared as such, probably because the title was too daring. Only three poems in the _Fleurs_ touch upon lesbianism, but the longest of these was one of the six which were ordered removed from the volume and which were not publicly printed again until 1911.