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.
These writings, argues critic Sally Mitchell
, were essentially in the sentimental mode, which sought to educate by promoting habits of good feeling rather than by presenting either rational arguments or deserved punishments.
Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Twayne.
79-80
In...
Textual Features
Dinah Mulock Craik
The figure of John Halifax dominates the entire book, and DMC
attempts to represent him both as a model entrepreneur (and thus an individualist) and as a perfect Christian.
owing to its sentimentality, but argues that the idealized portrait of a crippled man whose noble life it delineates makes physical disability a powerful figure for...
Cultural formation
Frances Cornford
She was brought up an agnostic, and not christened until about 1894, by which time, under the influence of the Christian message delivered in works like Charlotte Yonge
's The Daisy Chain, she had...
Textual Features
Ivy Compton-Burnett
The protagonist, a clergyman's daughter, lives up to her name. She is a child at her mother's graveside in the book's opening scene: by the age of thirty-three she has repeatedly sacrificed her hopes of...
Textual Production
Christabel Coleridge
CC
co-authored the epistolary novel The Miz Maze; or, The Winkworth Puzzle, A Story in Letters, by Nine Authors along with Charlotte Yonge
, Mary Bramston
, Frances Awdry
and others.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Textual Production
Christabel Coleridge
CC
's hagiographic life and letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge appeared in both England and the USA
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Family and Intimate relationships
Christabel Coleridge
CC
and her distant cousin the novelist Charlotte Yonge
shared a close and lifelong friendship.
Friends, Associates
Christabel Coleridge
In addition to her relationship with Charlotte Yonge
, CC
had a productive friendship with Mary Bramston
. The move to Torquay made her one of a group of women writers in the area, all...
Textual Features
Mary Cholmondeley
MC
details the various manuscripts left by Hester: a journal describing everything she read, a journal about bee-keeping, and a notebook containing brief biographies of important figures, as well as notebooks of quotations, poetry, and...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Charles
Although she made little money, EC
made a name for herself with the Chronicles. The novel went through several editions, as well as being translated into many European languages, Arabic, and numerous Indian dialects...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Charles
A sequel to Winifred Bertram and the World She Lived In (published a decade earlier), it traces a branch of the Schönberg-Cotta family who have now become part of the sheltered, orderly English middle-class.
