Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) was an English poet of the Victorian period. Educated at home by her parents, especially through the classics, religious texts, and fairytales, Christina was also influenced by Italian writers such as Dante Alighieri and Petrarch, as her father was an exiled Italian poet. Her first poems were published in 1848 when she was only seventeen. Bouts of illness and depression plagued Christina throughout her life; mortality, death, and corruptibility are recurring themes in her poems. Eventually publishing more than nine hundred poems in a handful of collections, Rossetti is considered one of the greatest poets of the Victorian period. She died from cancer in 1894.