Christina Rossetti wrote "From the Antique" in London, England after returning there with her mother from Frome in Somerset, England. In Frome she had been keeping up a school with her mother. In 1854 she returned to London where she cared for her ill father, who shortly died in April 1854. Though the poem probably reflects her own grief at being a woman in her time period, one could see how the grief of losing her father might have been an influence on her desolation. In the poem, a woman wonders whether, if she were to disappear from the world herself, anybody would miss her, or if the world would go on the same. This begs the question: did Rossetti herself suspect that, in her role as a woman, her life was not as valuable as her father's—and, therefore, that her death would be just as insignificant? It is impossible to know this now, however, we do know that returning to England to care for her dying father most certainly had an impact on Rossetti both as a person, and as a writer.