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.
Author(s): Clare Walker Gore, Clemence Schultze, Julia Courtney
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 360
City: Cham
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
