Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Charlotte Yonge
-
Standard Name: Yonge, Charlotte
Birth Name: Charlotte Mary Yonge
Pseudonym: Aunt Charlotte
CY
was a staggeringly prolific author. Her more than two hundred works include domestic and historical novels for both adults and children, biographies, history and language textbooks, religious manuals, and a fragment of autobiography. She became famous without adopting many of the habits of the Victorian professional author: she published anonymously and donated most of her earnings to charity. Though her most successful titles remained household names for generations, many others in the Macmillan Uniform Edition were quickly forgotten.
Delafield, E. M., and Georgina Battiscombe. “Introduction”. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life, Constable and Company, pp. 9-15.
14
Her underlying purpose is always religious. Her biographer Georgina Battiscombe
writes that filial duty is her great theme, to which both love and common sense must be sacrificed.
Battiscombe, Georgina, and E. M. Delafield. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable and Company.
74-5
She advises submission as a Christian duty and not as an exclusively gendered ideal. She deals also in religious scruples and struggles: confirmation (as the climax of an education in spiritual self-examination) is often an issue for her characters.
Throughout the 1880s KG
illustrated many little books by well-known authors. In 1883 she provided illustrations for Little Ann and Other Poems, a collection by the early nineteenth-century children's writers Ann (later Gilbert)
and...
Textual Production
Charlotte Mew
Her essay addresses several works by women writers: Sophia Lee
's The Recess, Emily Finch
's Last Days of Mary Stuart, Charlotte Yonge
's Unknown to History, and Harriet Martineau
's The Anglers of the Dove.
Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Editor Warner, Val, Carcanet and Virago.
378-9, 381
Textual Production
Frances Trollope
FT
published a novel entitled The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman, Illustrated with occasional extracts from her diary.
Charlotte Yonge
had not yet published her novel The Clever Woman of the Family...
Textual Production
E. M. Delafield
EMD
contributed an introduction to Georgina Battiscombe
's biography Charlotte Mary Yonge
: The Story of an Uneventful Life.
Harvey, Kathryn. "Driven by War into Politics": A Feminist Biography of Kathleen Innes. University of Alberta.
216
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jenkins
EJ
contributed an introduction to a volume, the seventh in John Lehmann
's The Chiltern Library, published in 1947 and containing two titles by Elizabeth Gaskell
. In her introduction to Thackeray
's Vanity...
A sequel to Winifred Bertram and the World She Lived In (published a decade earlier), it traces a branch of the Schönberg-Cotta family who have now become part of the sheltered, orderly English middle-class.
Charles, Elizabeth. The Bertram Family. Garland.
5
Textual Features
Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM
begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
Textual Features
Mary Cholmondeley
MC
details the various manuscripts left by Hester: a journal describing everything she read, a journal about bee-keeping, and a notebook containing brief biographies of important figures, as well as notebooks of quotations, poetry, and...
Textual Features
Marghanita Laski
The book aims at literary recuperation. Here ML
blends analysis with celebration, but she recalls her marginalised writers primarily to raise questions about the present state of writing for children. She says that her subjects...
Textual Features
Ellen Wood
The plot and pacing of the novel differ markedly from East Lynne, and are more in the style of Charlotte Yonge
than EW
's sensational contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon
. While the theft of...
Textual Features
Ivy Compton-Burnett
The protagonist, a clergyman's daughter, lives up to her name. She is a child at her mother's graveside in the book's opening scene: by the age of thirty-three she has repeatedly sacrificed her hopes of...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
The figure of John Halifax dominates the entire book, and DMC
attempts to represent him both as a model entrepreneur (and thus an individualist) and as a perfect Christian.