Charlotte Yonge is one of the most influential and important of Victorian women writers; but study of her work has been handicapped by a tendency to patronise both her and her writing, by the vast number of her publications and by a shortage of information about her professional career. Scholars have had to depend mainly on the work of her first biographer, a loyal disciple, a situation which has long been felt to be unsatisfactory. We hope that this edition of her correspondence will provide for the first time a substantial foundation of facts for the study of her fiction, her historical and educational writing and her journalism, and help to illuminate her biography and also her significance in the cultural and religious history of the Victorian age.
Featured Letters...
Dear Miss Yonge, I shall certainly be here between 3& 5 on Friday, unless something quite unforeseen falls out, and be very glad to see you.
Yours very faithfully A. Macmillan
... continue readingDean Church's beautiful book came in time for me to work it in with the Cardinal. It is a sort of key. By the way, there is a mistake- I don't know whether J. H. N.'s or Miss Mozley's - about the consecration of a church to which he could not go in 1838: it is said to be Hursley but it really was Otterbourne. Hursley was not consecrated, of course, till ... continue reading
My dear Miss Smith
Thank you for the end of your story which I like very much. Here and there you may have been a little discursive, and possibly abridgement may find out some bits. About the incongruity of wreaths with the feelings of the last generation I quite agree with you. We /elder ones felt it so with my dear old uncle who we knew held it as a frivolity, and ... continue reading
Dearest Lizzie- Here am I writing to you out upon the lawn under the pleasant shade of the berberis. There ought to be a nightingale singing, for one lives at the corner, but he is a lazy bird, and year after year always is nearly silent after the first fortnight, though yesterday I not only heard but saw his fellow singing with all his might in a young oak, making his tail and wings quiver.
I had ... continue reading