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.
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, 1930.
48
(Old Testament, no doubt), which Yonge intended to publish...
Reception
Mary Anne Barker
The Times, reviewing Sybil's Book in late 1873, found it both delightful and thoroughly original.
qtd. in
Gilderdale, Betty. The Seven Lives of Lady Barker. Canterbury University Press, 2009.
185
Betty Gilderdale
endorses this, calling it the first book to be published in England for teenage girls...
Reception
Rhoda Broughton
An article by Eliza Lynn Linton
written in June 1887 (well after the ebbing of RB
's early, scandalous reputation) judged that her books were always essentially love-stories, and nothing else,
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “Miss Broughton’s Novels”. Temple Bar, Vol.
80
, June 1887, pp. 196-09.
203
but that without...
Reception
Lucas Malet
Two things about this novel gave offence initially and had a long-term effect on its reputation: its treating the nasty
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
topic of deformity, and its involving the hero emotionally with three women (his mother as...
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
211
It has nevertheless generated conflicting stories about where it was actually lived. Yonge mentions neither neither Mickleham nor Reigate Hill, places associated by other sources with...
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.
Macaulay, Rose. Letters to a Friend from Rose Macaulay 1950-1952. Editor Babington Smith, Constance, Fontana, 1968.
14
LeFanu notes that it takes the themes of inheritance and unjust accusation so characteristic of the novels of Charlotte Yonge
and Sir Walter Scott
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...
Textual Features
Anne Mozley
The review of Adam Bede is indeed most perceptive as well as detailed. AM
begins by noticing how novels have been expanding their empire: how many have been added to their readership by the newer...
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.
Charles, Elizabeth. The Bertram Family. Garland, 1975.
5
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...
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...
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 Features
Ellen Wood
The plot and pacing of the novel differ markedly from East Lynne, and are more in the style of Charlotte Yonge
than EW
's sensational contemporary Mary Elizabeth Braddon
. While the theft of...
Textual Production
Charlotte Mew
Her essay addresses several works by women writers: Sophia Lee
's The Recess, Emily Finch
's Last Days of Mary Stuart, Charlotte Yonge
's Unknown to History, and Harriet Martineau
's The Anglers of the Dove.
Mew, Charlotte. Collected Poems and Prose. Editor Warner, Val, Carcanet and Virago, 1981.
