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.
EJ
contributed an introduction to a volume, the seventh in John Lehmann
's The Chiltern Library, published in 1947 and containing two titles by Elizabeth Gaskell
. In her introduction to Thackeray
's Vanity...
Harvey, Kathryn. "Driven by War into Politics": A Feminist Biography of Kathleen Innes. University of Alberta.
216
Literary responses
Jean Ingelow
The Athenæum declared in its review of Don John that JI
was a capital story-teller, but she will never make a novelist.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2818 (1881): 559
Despite insisting that the novel's plot was naught, the...
Anthologization
Elizabeth Gunning
This was initially in two volumes. Before the end of the year she had added A Sequel to Family Stories, which repeats the rest of the original title, and adds five further tales. Charlotte Yonge
Textual Production
Kate Greenaway
Throughout the 1880s KG
illustrated many little books by well-known authors. In 1883 she provided illustrations for Little Ann and Other Poems, a collection by the early nineteenth-century children's writers Ann (later Gilbert)
and...
Textual Production
Agnes Giberne
This means AG
was aiming at the market dominated by the work of Charlotte Yonge
. Her books for the young were often read to pieces, but most went through a series of reprints. Some...
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...
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...
Literary responses
Georgiana Fullerton
Geraldine Jewsbury
, reviewing this novel for the Athenæum, commented that GFalways writes with grace and tenderness, but she is afraid to trust herself to her own gifts. She seems to have a...
Textual Production
Georgiana Fullerton
GF
enjoyed a high literary and personal reputation during and immediately after her life. One article, published soon after her death in The Catholic World, compared her favourably with Jane Austen
, and claimed...
Intertextuality and Influence
Jessie Fothergill
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, pp. 66-89.
73
by revising a familiar story of renunciation and moral reward.
Friends, Associates
Edward FitzGerald
Despite a somewhat reclusive life both before and after his separation from his wife within a year of their marriage, he was well connected with the Victorian literary scene, and expressed strong opinions on women...
Anthologization
Sarah Fielding
She dedicated it to the court lady Anna Maria Poyntz
. It may perhaps be the Book Upon Education
Sabor, Peter, and Sarah Fielding. “Introduction”. The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last, University Press of Kentucky, p. vii - xli.
xxxix
which SF
was planning in October 1748, or that may have been something different that...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Fielding
The book's admirers included (perhaps embarrassingly) the courtesan Teresia Constantia Phillips
, who praised it in her Memoirs.
Catto, Susan J. Modest Ambition: The Influence of Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and the Ideal of Female Diffidence on Sarah Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, and Frances Brooke. University of Oxford.
72
Jane Collier
in her commonplace-book not only noted that Mrs Teachum has the Swift
ian...
Publishing
Juliana Horatia Ewing
Juliana Horatia Gatty (later JHE
) first reached print, with the story A Bit of Green. It appeared in the Monthly Packet, which was edited by Charlotte Mary Yonge
.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Nadel, Ira Bruce, and William E. Fredeman, editors. Dictionary of Literary Biography 21. Gale Research.
