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.
She was too shy to move in literary circles, though she did meet several writers who called on her, including Sarah Austin
and Sir Charles Trevelyan
. With each of them she felt uncomfortable, as...
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
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, 1994.
242
She uttered...
Friends, Associates
Anne Manning
Among her friends was fellow-writer Beatrice Braithwaite Batty
, who published posthumous reminiscences of her in the Englishwoman's Review in February 1880. Charlotte Yonge
, who praises Manning's qualities as a friend and a letter-writer...
Health
Anne Manning
Charlotte Yonge
says that her health began to fail in 1854. This seems an improbably early date, since she continued for almost two more decades to produce on average more than a book a year....
Intertextuality and Influence
Katharine Tynan
Despite the title, these poems do not present new themes, images, or structures. The most effective among them return to a theme always close to her heart: maternity. She celebrates female strength in two poems,...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dervla Murphy
In 1971, the present state of Bangladesh (formerly known as East Pakistan) had seceded from Pakistan, which had then fought a war with India (3-16 December 1971) over the secession. DM
was interested in the...
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, 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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Dinah Mulock Craik
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.
Her central characters, May and Elfie (of whom May is three years older), are her sister Amy Agnes
and herself. Also highly important are their parents, Nurse, Cook or Cookie, and the elder brother and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rose Macaulay
This roman à clef set in pre-war London touches on the opposition between conventional sexual mores and sexual freedom, and has fun with the idea of indiscriminate commitment to worthy causes. The young Eddy Oliver...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Sewell
She was a major influence on Anglican circles of her day. John Sutherland considers her to hold second place to Charlotte Yonge
.
Sutherland, John, b. 1938. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
Intertextuality and Influence
Anne Mozley
Clever Women, published in Blackwood's in 1868, considers the term of opprobrium with a possible nod to Charlotte Yonge
's The Clever Woman of the Family. AM
takes up the class of able...
Timeline
No timeline events available.
Texts
Yonge, Charlotte. Unknown to History. Macmillan, 1882, 2 vols.
Ewing, Juliana Horatia et al. Victorian Tales for Girls. Editor Laski, Marghanita, Pilot Press, 1947.
Yonge, Charlotte. What Books to Lend and What to Give. National Society’s Depository, 1887.
Yonge, Charlotte. Womankind. Mozley and Smith, 1876.
Oliphant, Margaret et al. Women Novelists of Queen Victoria’s Reign. Hurst and Blackett, 1897.
