Wrapped in a modern-day mystery, The Rossetti Diaries is a historical re-imagining that explores the indomitable artistic aspirations and achievements of the poet Christina Rossetti and the artist Elizabeth Siddal.

In 2019, historian Maggie Winegarden decides she needs to spend some time away from her partner Bethany, who is upset over Maggie’s desire to be a painter. Maggie visits the seaside town of Hastings and while in St. Clement’s Church discovers that poet Christina Rossetti and artist Elizabeth “Lizzie” Siddal had been frequent visitors to Hastings and the church. Agatha, the church caretaker, shows Maggie a chest of papers in the catacombs that the vicar said belonged to Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Maggie discovers the papers are actually the lost diaries of Christina and Lizzie. She learns that Christina’s and Lizzie’s lives are intertwined beyond being sisters-in-law, that they become intimate friends and establish a community of women artists and poets, a Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood in Lizzie’s ancestral home, Hope Hall.

Maggie is joined by Bethany and Agatha in the quest to solve the mystery of how the diaries were buried in the St. Clement’s Church catacombs and uncover surprising revelations on the origins of Christina’s most famous poem “Goblin Market.”

Kathleen Williams Renk is the granddaughter of East European immigrants.  Her grandfather Dmitri came from Ukraine and her grandmother Erzsébet came from Slovakia. She was born and spent her young life in St. Louis, MO where she attended Catholic school for twelve years, including four-years in an all-girls Catholic high school. As an undergraduate, she majored in Religion and Philosophy and graduated with honors. Later, she also earned a B.S. in Nursing and practiced as a registered nurse for twelve years before earning a doctorate in British and Postcolonial literature from the University of Iowa.
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While studying for her doctorate, she studied fiction writing with the Pulitzer-Prize winning author James Alan MacPherson. She taught at the university and college level for 30 years and most recently was a professor of English at Northern Illinois University, where she spent 14 years teaching British, postcolonial, Irish, and Women’s literature. Her favorite writers include A.S. Byatt, Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, Emma Donoghue, Sarah Waters, Peter Carey, Salman Rushie, Hilary Mantel, Peter Carey, Ian McEwan, J.M. Coetzee, and Ursula Le Guin.

​Her first historical fiction novel, Vindicated: A Novel of Mary Shelley won the 2021 Story Circle Network’s May Sarton Award in Historical Fiction and was short-listed for the CIBA Goethe Award in Historical Fiction. She has also published short fiction, creative nonfiction, and personal and numerous critical essays.

Williams Renk is the mother of three grown children and the grandmother of eight. She lives on the Front Range in Colorado with her husband of 46 years, along with their dogs, Sonia and Odie. In her spare time, she enjoys hiking, playing guitar, fiddle, pickle ball, trivia, and volunteering in an Inter-Generational Writing program at Colorado University, Boulder.

Williams Renk will be joined in conversation with Carol Roh Spaulding.  Roh Spaulding is the winner of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2022 for her book Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories.  Roh Spaulding’s stories and essays have appeared in several publications including Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and December magazine.  Awards for her work include a Pushcart Prize, Best American Essays 2019 Notable Mention, and the Eludia prize from Hidden River Arts for her forthcoming novel, Helen Button (Sowilo Press). A California native and granddaughter of Korean immigrants, she teaches at Drake University in Des Moines and lives in rural Iowa with her family.

Kathleen Renk takes us beyond Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, to Victorian England and into the imagined lives of women on the periphery of artistic greatness by association with the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood whose careers eclipsed their own. The lover and the sister of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lizzie Siddall and Christina Rossetti, reveal in diary entries over a century after their death their profound commitment to their own painting and poetry, respectively, along with the immense challenges in being taken seriously as artists and independent thinkers. When the women eventually meet, the passionate bond they form as friends serves as a brief respite from the society they must move among as girls/women experiencing injustices around mental health, health care, sexual abuse and artistic achievement readers will recognize today. At the same time, the novel illuminates the era through memorable historical detail such as the story behind the painting of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia, séance societies, and abortion practices. But one of the most distinct pleasures of the novel was encountering familiar poems of Christina Rossetti resonating with the author’s biographical interpretation, which renders them newly, heart-achingly, accessible. Siddall and Rossetti paid a steep price for daring to live on their own terms as artists and friends; but despite the inevitable tragedy, these are women we should see more of in narrative, women who defined themselves not through men but through their art. – Carol Roh Spaulding, author of Waiting for Mr. Kim and Other Stories (Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction) and Helen Button.