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.
This means AG
was aiming at the market dominated by the work of Charlotte Yonge
. Her books for the young were often read to pieces, but most went through a series of reprints. Some...
Textual Production
Kate Greenaway
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...
Anthologization
Elizabeth Gunning
This was initially in two volumes. Before the end of the year she had added A Sequel to Family Stories, which repeats the rest of the original title, and adds five further tales. Charlotte Yonge
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...
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...
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...
Publishing
Annie Keary
AK
's contributions to The Monthly Packet, an evangelical periodical edited by Charlotte Yonge
, began not with a story but with chapters on early Norwegian history,
During the early 1960s MK
read her paper Harriett Mozley
: A Forerunner of Charlotte Yonge, at the Charlotte M. Yonge Society
, of which, along with many of her writing friends, she had...
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...
ML
, a cultural force in twentieth-century Britain, published six novels, four biographies (one on multiple subjects), an anti-nuclear play, a collection of children's stories, three quasi-scientific investigations into secular and religious experiences, and various...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Yonge, Charlotte. What Books to Lend and What to Give. National Society’s Depository, 1887.
Yonge, Charlotte. Womankind. Mozley and Smith, 1876.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.