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, 1943, 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, 1943.
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.
Scholar Helen Debenham
argues that it disconcertingly revises Charlotte Yonge and upsets expected patterns of response
Debenham, Helen. “’Almost always two sides to a question’: the novels of Jessie Fothergill”. Popular Victorian Women Writers, edited by Kay Boardman and Shirley Jones, Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. 66-89.
73
by revising a familiar story of renunciation and moral reward.
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
This book reflects MF
's wide reading and an impish sense of humour employed to help her and her readers live with the unacceptable. Each chapter comes headed by a very funny cartoon and a...
Laski, Marghanita, and Georgina Battiscombe, editors. A Chaplet for Charlotte Yonge. Cresset Press, 1965.
11, 13
Leisure and Society
Carola Oman
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...
Literary responses
Mary Martha Sherwood
Charlotte Yonge
in 1870 wrote that MMS
had adapted the original to her own Evangelical style and had introduced one admirable fairy tale.
Yonge, Charlotte, editor. A Storehouse of Stories. Macmillan, 1870–1872, 2 vols.
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...
Literary responses
Viola Meynell
In The Bookman, C. E. Lawrence
welcomed this novel as an individual effort of work which proves that however much she may have studied in the past . . . Miss Meynell has a...
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...
Literary responses
Rosa Nouchette Carey
Elaine Hartnell
argues that the reception of RNC
's work was tied somewhat to its modes and places of publication, notably her serialisation in journals edited by Ellen Wood
, Charlotte Yonge
, and Annie S. Swan
Literary responses
George Eliot
Cross
, concerned to protect and dignify her, chose the more sententious passages and excluded the spontaneous, trivial, and humorous remarks
Eliot, George. “Preface”. The George Eliot Letters, edited by Gordon S. Haight, Yale University Press, 1954, p. 1: ix - lxxvii.
xiv
from her personal writings, and presented an icon of Victorian moral earnestness; many...
Literary responses
Rosa Nouchette Carey
During her lifetime there was no shortage, in reviews of her novels in the popular press, of such adjectives as fresh, charming, and pretty, handy for quoting in listings of her works...
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...
Literary responses
Harriett Mozley
HM
's brother John Henry
(later famous as Cardinal Newman) said her first book had the fault of being too brilliant.
qtd. in
Tillotson, Kathleen et al. “Harriett Mozley”. Mid-Victorian Studies, Athlone Press, 1965, pp. 38-48.
38-9
It was read everywhere by both High and Low Church parties. Several...
Literary responses
Georgiana Fullerton
GF
's mother, Lady Granville
, is said to have regretted that Ellen Middleton was quite so mournful. But contemporary reviewers were generally positive, and the novel proved popular. William Ewart Gladstone
, reviewing it...
