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
Textual Production Agnes Giberne
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...
Textual Production Kathleen E. Innes
KEI 's Hampshire Pilgrimages: Men and women who have sojourned in Hampshire, presented brief lives of Austen , Charlotte Mary Yonge , Florence Nightingale , Gilbert White , William Cobbett , and Joseph Stevens .
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,
Keary, Eliza. Memoir of Annie Keary. Macmillan.
127
for which she gathered books and...
Friends, Associates Margaret Kennedy
Other women writers with whom MK established friendships included Lettice Cooper , Phyllis Bentley (who had also been at Cheltenham ), Marghanita Laski , Elizabeth Jenkins , and Rose Macaulay . These authors supported and...
Textual Production Margaret Kennedy
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...
Leisure and Society Marghanita Laski
ML co-founded the Charlotte M. Yonge Society , along with friends and fellow writers and Yonge enthusiasts Elizabeth Jenkins , Georgina Battiscombe , and Lettice Cooper , among others.
Laski, Marghanita, and Georgina Battiscombe, editors. A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge. Cresset Press.
11, 13
Textual Production Marghanita Laski
ML edited and introduced Victorian Tales for Girls, which includes tales by Mary Louisa Molesworth , Charlotte Yonge , Frances Hodgson Burnett , Juliana Ewing , Annie Fellows-Johnston , and one anonymous author.
Ewing, Juliana Horatia et al. Victorian Tales for Girls. Editor Laski, Marghanita, Pilot Press.
prelims
Textual Production Marghanita Laski
Jointly with biographer and writer Georgina Battiscombe , ML edited and contributed to a volume of essays for the Charlotte M. Yonge Society : A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge.
Battiscombe published a successful first...
Author summary Marghanita Laski
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...
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...

Timeline

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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.