Charlotte Mary Yonge: Writing the Victorian Age: Writing the Victorian Age

This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the life and work of Charlotte M. Yonge, a highly influential and popular nineteenth-century writer who is emerging from a long period of critical neglect. Its wide-ranging chapters capture the scope and quality of current work in Yonge studies, addressing the full range of her prolific literary output from her best-selling novels to her nature writing, biographies, and letters. Considering themes from gender, disability, and empire, to Tractarianism, secularism, and the idea of progress, these essays consider how Yonge reflected and shaped the tastes, ideas and anxieties of her readers and contemporaries. Exploring her key role in the Anglican revival, her importance as a test case in the development of feminist criticism, and her formal innovativeness as a novelist, this collection places Yonge centrally in the nineteenth-century literary landscape and demonstrates her ongoing relevance to scholars and students of the period. Preface Acknowledgements Contents Notes on Contributors Chronology Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Why Revisit Yonge? 2 Involvement with the Oxford Movement 3 Early Life 4 Popular Success 5 Later Career 6 Posthumous Reputation 7 This Collection Works Cited Part I: Home and Family Chapter 2: ‘What I Can Myself Remember’: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Life Writing 1 Introduction 2 ‘A Native of the Land of Childhood’ 3 Rural Riots 4 Later Reflections Works Cited Chapter 3: A Woman’s Outlook: Charlotte Yonge’s Sense of Place 1 Introduction 2 The Herb of the Field: ‘Botanizing’ and Yonge’s Early Nature Writing 3 Later Nature Writing: An Old Woman’s Outlook in a Hampshire Village and John Keble’s Parishes 4 The Importance of Place in Yonge’s Fiction from Abbeychurch to Modern Broods 5 The Two Guardians; or, Home in This World: Wordsworth in Devon? 6 Beechcroft at Rockstone: ‘In a Spring-Tide Wood’, Tractarian Eco-Theology in Practice 7 Yonge in the Anthropocene: Hopes and Fears for the Future Works Cited Chapter 4: Charlotte M. Yonge and the Long Victorian Family: Instructing the ‘Mother-Sister’ 1 Introduction 2 ‘Never Mind Sister’: The Victorian Mother-Sister and Domestic Authority 3 ‘More of a Governess and Less of a Sister’: Redefining Mother-Sisters in Scenes and Characters 4 Conclusion Works Cited Chapter 5: ‘A Lady with a Profession’: The Governess, the Invalid, and the Woman Question in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge 1 Introduction 2 The Problem of the Governess and the Appeal of the Invalid 3 ‘A Useful, Steady Daughter and Sister at Home’: Domestic Education in The Daisy Chain 4 ‘The Hot-bed Nurture of Intellect’ and ‘Concessions to Mental Independence’: The Dangerous Governesses of Hopes and Fears 5 ‘I Only Esteem Both Sisters the More’: Praiseworthy Work and the Williams Sisters in The Clever Woman of the Family Works Cited Chapter 6: ‘Hard Cash is a Necessary Consideration’: Money and Class in Charlotte M. Yonge’s Novels of Contemporary Family Life 1 Introduction 2 Novels of the 1840s to 1860s 3 The 1870s 4 The 1880s and 1890s Works Cited Part II: Society and Ideologies Chapter 7: ‘The Wheels of this World’: Science, Enquiry, and Progress in Charlotte Yonge’s Novels 1 Introduction 2 Material Advances and the Speed of Change 3 Progress, Politics, and Unbelief in Abbeychurch and Dynevor Terrace 4 Science, Materialism, and Religion 5 Rationalists, Germanists, and Infidels 6 Science, Systems, and Self-Sufficiency 7 Personal Progress: From Self-Sufficiency to Penitence 8 Society and Progress Works Cited Chapter 8: Charlotte Mary Yonge and the Concept of Conservative Community 1 Introduction 2 The Tory Romantic Tradition 3 Heartsease or the Brother’s Wife (1854): Reforming the Aristocracy at the Heart of the Ideal Conservative Community 4 Hopes and Fears: Transferring Tory Paternalism from Country to City (and Back Again) 5 Conclusion: Conservative Community in Yonge’s Fiction at the End of the Century Works Cited Chapter 9: Architecture, Faith, and Charlotte M. Yonge 1 Introduction 2 ‘A sort of visible emblem of the Christian faith’: The Changing Meaning of the Church 3 ‘A heart-felt expression of awe and reverence’: Place and Affect 4 ‘We had a feeling against treating it as a sight’: The Problem of Right Perception Works Cited Chapter 10: Charlotte Yonge and Mission 1 Mission Abroad and at Home 2 Tractarians and Mission 3 ‘Eminently practical and hard-working’: Missionary Biographies 4 The Daisy Chain and The Trial 5 Hopes and Fears 6 Woman’s Mission 7 The Making of a Missionary: Changing Views Works Cited Chapter 11: Charlotte Yonge and the World Beyond Europe 1 Far Horizons 2 India 3 The West Indies 4 North and South America 5 Australia and New Zealand 6 Conclusion Works Cited Part III: Criticism and Reception Chapter 12: Looking Through the Past: Charlotte Yonge as Historical Novelist 1 Introduction 2 Yonge’s Formation as a Historical Novelist 3 The Early Years 4 The Middle Years: The Dove in the Eagle’s Nest and The Chaplet of Pearls 5 Reading Yonge as a Historical Novelist: Reception and Legacy Works Cited Chapter 13: ‘A Sort of Instrument for Popularizing Church Views’: Charlotte Yonge, Her Mentors, and Her Publishers 1 Introduction 2 Early Publishers 3 ‘I Am Too High Church and Too Narrow’ 4 A Break in the Pattern 5 The Last Twenty Years 6 Conclusion Works Cited Chapter 14: Charlotte M. Yonge, Religious Conversion, and Victorian Modernity 1 Introduction 2 Yonge, Woolf, and Individual Authenticity 3 Defamiliarisation and ‘Doubling’ 4 Psychologised Typology and Modern Alienation 5 The Gothic and Modernity 6 Conclusion: Conversion as Ontological Redirection Works Cited Chapter 15: Charlotte M. Yonge and the Realist Tradition 1 Introduction 2 The Realist Tradition 3 The Realism of Lived Time 4 Conclusion Works Cited Chapter 16: Reading the Reception History of Charlotte Yonge 1 Introduction 2 Yonge and Her Early Biographers 3 Yonge, Realism, and the ‘New Critics’ 4 Mid-Twentieth-Century and Feminist Criticism 5 Reconsidering Yonge in the 1980s and 1990s 6 Yonge and Current Scholarship 7 Future Directions Works Cited Index This interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the life and work of Charlotte M. Yonge, a highly influential and popular nineteenth-century writer who is emerging from a long period of critical neglect. Its wide-ranging chapters capture the scope and quality of current work in Yonge studies, addressing the full range of her prolific literary output from her best-selling novels to her nature writing, biographies, and letters. Considering themes from gender, disability, and empire, to Tractarianism, secularism, and the idea of progress, these essays consider how Yonge reflected and shaped the tastes, ideas and anxieties of her readers and contemporaries. Exploring her key role in the Anglican revival, her importance as a test case in the development of feminist criticism, and her formal innovativeness as a novelist, this collection places Yonge centrally in the nineteenth-century literary landscape and demonstrates her ongoing relevance to scholars and students of the period. Clare Walker Gore is a lecturer in English Literature at the Open University. She held a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was named a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker. Her book, Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, appeared in 2019. She is pursuing a project on Victorian women writers. Clemence Schultze is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Classics at Durham University, after a career lecturing on ancient history. She has published on nineteenth-century classical reception, was for ten years Chair of the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship, and has co-edited an essay collection on Yonge. Julia Courtney is retired from the Open University where she was an administrator, associate lecturer and research fellow. She has published articles and book chapters on aspects of Victorian literature and culture and has co-edited two essay collections. She is co-editor, with Clemence Schultze, of the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship Journal