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.
In spite of the fact that her family did not value literature as much as games, and that her mother had specific ideas about what girls should read, EN
devoured every book she could get...
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.
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
MO
's Autobiography had modern editions in 1974, 1988, and 1990. Q. D. Leavis
(who combined deep respect for Oliphant with harsh criticism of Charlotte Yonge
), in a preface to the 1974 edition, argued...
In a letter to the Times in 1962, CO
described a bookcase in her writing-room which held the works she described as All the Winners. For a writer of fairly conservative views and strong...
“About The National Society (Church of England) for Promoting Religious Education”. The National Society for Promoting Religious Education: The Society.
It issued a number of titles by FMP
, many of them...
Publishing
Frances Mary Peard
FMP
published under her initials her first book: The Wood-Cart: and Other Tales of the South of France, a collection of stories reprinted from The Magazine for the Young (which, like The Monthly Packet...
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...
Publishing
Frances Mary Peard
FMP
's acquaintance with Charlotte Yonge
began in connection with her writing for Yonge's Monthly Paper of Sunday Teaching a paper on the Jewish Sects
Harris, Mary J. Y. Memoirs of Frances Mary Peard. W. H. Smith.
48
(Old Testament, no doubt), which Yonge intended to publish...
Her education began with her mother and a governess. At six she began attending a class run by the sister of another Rugby master. Later came visits to a piano teacher, and at home a...
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.
242
She uttered...
Friends, Associates
Margaret Roberts
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
Textual Production
Elizabeth Sewell
ES
and Charlotte Yonge
together published with their surnames and initials Historical Selections, A Series of Readings from the Best Authorities on English and European History.
