Charlotte Mary Yonge

English novelist

• Born: August 11, 1823
• Birthplace: Otterbone, Hampshire, England
• Died: March 24, 1901
• Place of death: Elderfield, Hampshire, England

One of the most popular English novelists of her time, Yonge wrote more than one hundred books and was the editor of a girls’ magazine through four decades. Although she is best remembered for her juvenile novels, she is regarded as the leading female voice of the Oxford Movement, and her adult novel The Heir of Redclyffe ranked alongside the works of Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters during her time.

Early Life

Born into a landed English country family, Charlotte Mary Yonge (yahng) was the first child of William Yonge and Fanny Bagus. She was educated by both parents, with her father taking a leading role after the birth of her brother, Julian, in 1830. As a young girl, Charlotte was devoted to reading William Shakespeare, the novels of Sir Walter Scott, and Maria Edgeworth’s children’s tales that carried specific moral messages. She was seven when she learned to write; her father postponed teaching her to write until he believed her hand was strong enough to hold, chalk, slates, and pens.

Charlotte had a happy childhood, playing with her dolls, wandering in nature, and enjoying a quiet life with her parents. She would later return to her childhood in her fiction and children’s stories. The entire Yonge family was distinguished, and Charlotte would also later draw on the careers of her relatives for the families in her fiction. Yonge was later described as possessing an expressive face with lively brown eyes and hair that turned white as she aged. Although a private person who never married, she enjoyed being around large families with children.

In 1833, Yonge visited London. She did not make another significant trip until 1869, when she joined her brother and his wife on a trip to France. Meanwhile, the year 1835 was a turning point in her life as John Keble (1792-1865) was installed as the vicar of Hursely, her family’s home parish. Yonge had had little religious instruction during her childhood, but under Keble’s tutelage, she prepared for confirmation in 1838. She also developed a close friendship with Keble, who worked with her father in church building, for which Charlotte developed a passion. Around that same time, Charlotte became a parish teacher in a school that her mother founded.

In 1839, Yonge published her first fiction—children’s stories in French. Her first novel, Abbeychurch , was published in 1844 over the objections of her grandmother, Mary Kingman Bargus, who lived with Yonge’s family and forced Charlotte to donate her earnings to charity. From the time of her publication of Henrietta’s Wish; Or, Domineering (1850), the story of a disobedient son with an overly protective mother, Yonge continued to produce a steady stream of popular novels and shared the literary marketplace with Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, through 1900.

Life’s Work

Later known as the “novelist of the Oxford Movement,” Yonge was devoted to writing fiction that displayed the positive virtues of family, hard work, and devotion to the Christian faith. She was passionate about education for both sexes and had a special interest in educating girls. She believed in missionary work and put twelve thousand pounds of her earnings from The Daisy Chain (1856) into the building of a religious school in the Melanesian Islands. She was also responsive to the “crisis of faith” of her era and used it as a theme in The Two Guardians (1852), Hopes and Fears (1860), Magnum Bonum (1876), and The Long Vacation (1895).

Yonge extended her interest in church building into Abbeychurch, Heartease (1854), The Daisy Chain, and The Pillars of the House (1873). She was also drawn to theme of service to the poor, using The Three Brides (1876) and Modern Broods (1900) to create characters who strive to be unselfish in their charitable acts. Shortly before her death, she was writing The Making of a Missionary , a novel designed to present missionaries as respectable characters in an effort to redress such characters as Mrs. Jellyby, whom Charles Dickens had used in Bleak House (1852-1853) to satirize missionary efforts.

Yonge’s career as a novelist spanned 1844 to 1900, during which time she published more than one hundred books. She was also the editor of The Monthly Packet from 1851 to 1890. Her primary interests in both her novels and her magazine were the lives of women and women’s places in the family. Her women characters consistently show resourcefulness and loyalty to their families, without ever sacrificing their tightly prescribed behaviors as respectable women. Yonge charted the evolution of the family and its many tensions through her fictional May family in books such as The Daisy Chain and The Trial and through the Underwood family of The Pillars of the House. Of all Yonge’s novels, those titles and her adult novel The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) are her best known.

The Daisy Chain introduces Ethel May, a character drawn after Yonge herself, as a child, while The Trial shows her as the pillar of the May family after the death of Mrs. May. Ethel is a retiring, but wise and stable, character who sacrifices her own happiness for that of others and who is devoted to her own family and the families close to her, as Yonge herself was. The Heir of Redclyffe has been credited with introducing several innovations to Victorian novels, particularly the expert manner in which Yonge handles her male characters, Guy Morville and Philip Edmonstone, as they struggle against their own human natures to live up to social expectations of manhood. The Pillars of the House presents the Underwood family at work for the good of the neighborhood in their church building and other social activities.

As a stylist, Yonge made greater use of dialogue than description. Her plots are intricate but not complicated, and evidence of her reading of Shakespeare and Scott abounds in the multiple layers of the plot and their seamless integration. Major and minor characters are equally developed, and Yonge shows skill in the treatment of strains and tests of will. For example, the female protagonist in Hopes and Fears makes choices that ultimately leave her unmarried.

In 1876, Yonge lost much of her income when she paid off the debts of her brother Julian, who faced bankruptcy after his coal mining venture failed. In 1884, Julian sold the family’s Otterborne House. However, Charlotte had earlier moved to a smaller house on the same property in 1862 and lived there throughout the rest of her life.

In her later years, Yonge returned to her own past to write Old Times at Otterbourne (1891), An Old Woman’s Outlook (1892), and John Keble’s Parishes (1898). In 1899, Sir Walter Besant arranged a scholarship for a Winchester High School girl called the Charlotte Mary Yonge Scholarship to be awarded to fund a young worthy girl’s college education. On March 24, 1901, Yonge died in her home. At the time of her death, she was working on three other books, mainly memoirs about her childhood.

Significance

Charlotte Yonge’s novels continue to attract critical attention, especially in the arena of feminist criticism. Her main themes are family, education, service, and challenges of achieving adulthood. She wrote nostalgically of an innocent world of childhood in which moral choices are clear and life paths appear to be well defined. She appreciated the details of ordinary life and created a fictional world in which her characters, although tested, remain confident that happy outcomes are within reach.

Bibliography

Battiscombe, Georgina. Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. London: Constable, 1943. Provides a succinct account of Yonge’s life and major works; includes portraits of Yonge in watercolor and photographs.

Coleridge, Christabel Rose. Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters. London: Macmillan, 1903. The first biography by her friend Coleridge is written in the tradition of Victorian biographies; includes extracts from her letters.

Dennis, Barbara. Charlotte Yonge, 1823-1901: Novelist of the Oxford Movement. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Presents Yonge in the context of the main ideas of the Oxford Movement.

Jordan, Ellen, et al. “’A Handmaid to the Church’: How John Keble Shaped the Life and Work of Charlotte Yonge, the ’Novelist of the Oxford Movement.’” In John Keble in Context, edited by Kirstie Blair. London: Anthem Press, 2004. Charts the ways Keble influenced Yonge’s career, including her work as a parish teacher, as editor of The Monthly Packet, organizer of parish social events, and manager of the parish library. Examines Keble’s role in Yonge’s selection of themes and approaches, including that of showing characters humbled by forces beyond their control.

Sturrock, June.“Heaven and Home”: Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria, 1995. Focuses on The Daisy Chain, The Clever Woman of the Family, and The Three Brides to illustrate how they exemplify Yonge’s depiction of the heroine and the ideal woman.

Thompson, Nicola D., ed. Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Collects essays on the theme of Victorian womanhood in general and on Yonge, in Sturrock’s chapter 7 essay on Dyvenor Terrace.