’A Triad’, written in 1856, is one of Rossetti's typically cutting and uncompromising representations of the amatory possibilities available to Victorian women. The love that women are socially encouraged to pursue brings shame, despair, and death; even the supposedly ‘successful’ wife survives like a prize pig, in a most unenviable state of complacency and lifelessness. To shame oneself as a mistress, to shrivel away in ‘famished’ spinsterhood, or to be bound to a ‘soulless’ marriage: Rossetti paints woeful destinies for one and all.

Acute social criticism exists in Rossetti's work in tandem with her emphasis on dreams, secrets, and the vanity of earthly preoccupations. There is a marked tension between her resistance to dominant bourgeois ideologies and her longing to retreat from the world: explicit protests against the injustices and inequalities of mid-Victorian England are paralleled by imaginative recourse to a utopian afterlife or, as in ‘From the Antique’ (PP 37), to a fantasy that one could simply cease to be:

The opening lines here are proto-feminist in their expression of dissatisfaction, but the desire to claim the privileges of masculinity is soon overpowered by the wish to be ‘nothing at all in all the world, | Not a body and not a soul’ (ll. 5–6).