Maria Francesca Rossetti – författare

'Any acquaintance with a work so sublime must needs be better than none. A shadow may win the gaze of some who never looked upon the substance.' In this scholarly introduction to the Divine Comedy, Maria Francesca Rossetti (1827-76) urges readers not to be put off by Dante's difficult language and befuddling cosmology. Deploying prose summaries alongside translated extracts of the poem, she takes the reader on a tour through Dante's world, from the first shadowy appearance of Virgil to the pilgrimage through Paradise. Rossetti also illuminates many aspects of the poem usually considered impenetrable by its English readership. Among them are the geography of the landscape, the connotations of the most significant Italian images, and the incorporation of the classical vision of Hell into the Christian version. Maps, textual annotations and thorough linguistic notes support her exegesis, which, though originally published in 1871, remains one of the finest available today.

This innovative aid to the study of Italian was published in 1867 by Maria Francesca Rossetti (1827-76), the older sister of Dante Gabriel, William Michael and Christina. A scholar and teacher of Italian, she was later to publish A Shadow of Dante, a guide to the Divine Comedy, also reissued in the Cambridge Library Collection. Her purpose here, as she explains in her preface, is to demonstrate idiomatic Italian usage by providing short passages translated very literally into English, so that the 'unnatural' English phraseology demonstrates the correct Italian construction. The passages are to be translated back into Italian, with the help of some supplied vocabulary and an opening chapter which elucidates some of the more difficult aspects of Italian grammar, often by comparing Italian with French usage. The technique had long been used for Latin and Greek prose composition, but was innovatory for modern languages.