Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
Early in her career SSW
also published instructional books for children (though the generic boundary between these and story-books is by no means clear; Lissa Paul
calls these teaching narratives realistic fiction).
Paul, in...
Friends, Associates
John Strange Winter
JSW
had an extensive social circle in London—her biographer, Oliver Bainbridge
, notes that a number of social claims were made upon her by reason of her popularity, and that these were always in advance...
politics
John Strange Winter
JSW
's interest in animal welfare was linked to her passion for dress reform, notably her opposition to the use of birds in decoration or fashion (a letter she wrote to Charlotte Yonge
details how...
Anthologization
Mary Wollstonecraft
This book (several times reprinted in England and America, but now rare) has often been omitted from lists of her works. Most of the illustrations, which were added in the second edition, 1791, are by...
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 Production
Emma Jane Worboise
EJW
also wrote novels which respond in similar manner to Charlotte Yonge
's Heartsease; or, The Brother's Wife and Elizabeth Sewell
's Amy Herbert. In each of these (titled respectively Hearts-ease in the Family...