Charlotte Yonge

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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.
Black and white reproduction of an albumen print of Charlotte Yonge's head by the Rev. Duke Yonge, 1858? The image is oval; the sitter is seen in profile facing left. She is wearing a small, light cap, a pale ribbon around her neck fastened with a brooch (perhaps a cameo), and embroidery around her collar. National Portrait Gallery.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Material Conditions of Writing Anne Manning
According to the old Dictionary of National Biography, she wrote this at Norbury Priory near Mickleham. Charlotte Yonge links it with the priory she mentions on Salisbury Plain.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett.
212
A young aunt...
Literary responses Jean Ingelow
The Athenæum declared in its review of Don John that JI was a capital story-teller, but she will never make a novelist.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2818 (1881): 559
Despite insisting that the novel's plot was naught, the...
Literary responses Julia Stretton
Charlotte Yonge , writing in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign, published in 1897 by Margaret Oliphant and others, grouped JS with Lady Georgiana Fullerton and Anne Manning as similar in the purity and...
Literary responses Dinah Mulock Craik
Sally Mitchell characterizes it as embarrassing to read
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
64
owing to its sentimentality, but argues that the idealized portrait of a crippled man whose noble life it delineates makes physical disability a powerful figure for...
Literary responses Viola Meynell
In The Bookman, C. E. Lawrence welcomed this novel as an individual effort of work which proves that however much she may have studied in the past . . . Miss Meynell has a...
Literary responses Annie Keary
Twentieth-century children's writer Gillian Avery found AK 's name in Charlotte Yonge 's little book What Books to Lend and What to Give, 1887, which mentions four of her works as suitable for prizes...
Literary responses Rosa Nouchette Carey
Elaine Hartnell argues that the reception of RNC 's work was tied somewhat to its modes and places of publication, notably her serialisation in journals edited by Ellen Wood , Charlotte Yonge , and Annie S. Swan
Literary responses George Eliot
Cross , concerned to protect and dignify her, chose the more sententious passages and excluded the spontaneous, trivial, and humorous remarks
Eliot, George. “Preface”. The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Yale University Press, p. 1: ix - lxxvii.
xiv
from her personal writings, and presented an icon of Victorian moral earnestness; many...
Literary responses Rosa Nouchette Carey
During her lifetime there was no shortage, in reviews of her novels in the popular press, of such adjectives as fresh, charming, and pretty, handy for quoting in listings of her works...
Literary responses Elizabeth Charles
Although she made little money, EC made a name for herself with the Chronicles. The novel went through several editions, as well as being translated into many European languages, Arabic, and numerous Indian dialects...
Literary responses Harriett Mozley
HM 's brother John Henry (later famous as Cardinal Newman) said her first book had the fault of being too brilliant.
Tillotson, Kathleen et al. “Harriett Mozley”. Mid-Victorian Studies, Athlone Press, pp. 38-48.
38-9
It was read everywhere by both High and Low Church parties. Several...
Literary responses Georgiana Fullerton
GF 's mother, Lady Granville , is said to have regretted that Ellen Middleton was quite so mournful. But contemporary reviewers were generally positive, and the novel proved popular. William Ewart Gladstone , reviewing it...
Literary responses Georgiana Fullerton
Geraldine Jewsbury , reviewing this novel for the Athenæum, commented that GFalways writes with grace and tenderness, but she is afraid to trust herself to her own gifts. She seems to have a...
Literary responses Emma Marshall
Miss Eden (eldest daughter of a Bishop of Bath and Wells) liked Helen's Diary the best of EM 's books so far. She thought it quite as good as some of Miss Sewell 's, and...
Literary responses Margaret Oliphant
MO 's Autobiography had modern editions in 1974, 1988, and 1990. Q. D. Leavis (who combined deep respect for Oliphant with harsh criticism of Charlotte Yonge ), in a preface to the 1974 edition, argued...

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