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.
This roman à clef set in pre-war London touches on the opposition between conventional sexual mores and sexual freedom, and has fun with the idea of indiscriminate commitment to worthy causes. The young Eddy Oliver...
Textual Features
Rose Macaulay
This was the first full-length critical work on Forster. It expressed admiration for his writing, but some amusement or impatience over what it presents as his obsession with Englishness and with the all-male educational world...
Education
Edna Lyall
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Edna Lyall
Her central characters, May and Elfie (of whom May is three years older), are her sister Amy Agnes
and herself. Also highly important are their parents, Nurse, Cook or Cookie, and the elder brother and...
Friends, Associates
Mary Linskill
In these straits she found her friends worse than useless; they had never experienced poverty, far less starvation. Jenny Miles
apparently reproached her with the fact that George Eliot
, Charlotte Yonge
, Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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...
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...
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,