Conditions on Snowdon had been dry, but gusting winds had made walking difficult.

Like the other fantasists dealt with in this volume, Rossetti used fantasy to subvert and undermine traditionalist notions, in this instance notions of male power and female submissiveness.

Witness this army of such mass and charge / Led by a delicate and tender prince,

[…] responded with temper and irritability toward her step-daughter, Anna, who was so demure and so complete a member of the new society, and toward Ngaoli, her co-mother-in-law, gaunt, old, married under the old system, a devoted church member, righteous mother of five children, who fortunately had no complications in her life.