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.
Since the cousin with whom she shared lessons was three years older, Ada Ellen read a good many books at that time which must have been far beyond . . . [her] powers. At twelve...
Family and Intimate relationships
Margaret Mead
Her engagement at seventeen was probably, like her becoming a Christian, an act of rebellion against her parents, who were both nearly thirty when they married, and who wanted her to wait—especially against her mother...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Mozley
Her father, Henry Mozley
, was a bookseller and publisher. As well as Anne herself, he published Jane Harvey
, Charlotte Yonge
, and new editions of Hester Chapone
's Letters on the Improvement of...
Family and Intimate relationships
Christabel Coleridge
CC
and her distant cousin the novelist Charlotte Yonge
shared a close and lifelong friendship.
Family and Intimate relationships
Elma Napier
Her husband was the grandson of the first Lord Aldenham
and the godson of Charlotte Mary Yonge
.
Napier, Elma. Youth Is a Blunder. J. Cape.
5
He worked for his family firm, whose many foreign interests required him to travel to various countries.
Family and Intimate relationships
Julia Stretton
Charlotte Yonge
, writing of JS
in Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign, 1897, observes that at this date an abnormally large family was no misfortune to themselves or their parents.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett.
204
Their house...
Friends, Associates
Frances Mary Peard
One of FMP
's close friends was Charlotte Yonge
, who helped her develop a writing career, and whose earliest surviving letter to her is dated April 1861. For a while Peard was one of...
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote to Charlotte Yonge
a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press.
As well as her close friendship with Peard
, living at Torquay made MR
one of a circle of women writers which included Anna Drury
, Christabel Coleridge
, and (offstage, as it were) Charlotte Yonge
Friends, Associates
Anne Manning
Among her friends was fellow-writer Beatrice Braithwaite Batty
, who published posthumous reminiscences of her in the Englishwoman's Review in February 1880. Charlotte Yonge
, who praises Manning's qualities as a friend and a letter-writer...
Friends, Associates
Edward FitzGerald
Despite a somewhat reclusive life both before and after his separation from his wife within a year of their marriage, he was well connected with the Victorian literary scene, and expressed strong opinions on women...