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...

To Sir John Taylor Coleridge
Otterbourn
Sept 27th [1851 ]
My dear Mr Judge Very much indeed do I thank you for sending me so exactly the kind of criticism I wanted, though I am afraid you will hardly thank me for sending you 100 pages more when you have just said there is too much of it already, but I do it for the convenience of its all coming home together by Papa, who will be at Deerpark on Friday, and I hope will see ... continue reading
To Alexander Macmillan
Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
March 3d 1874

Dear Mr Macmillan I send the two vols of Bishop Patteson by train today, having done all the abridging that I think they will bear, I believe it is about 100pp in each volume, and a good many lines besides so that with smaller type and thinner paper I think it will be reduced enough.

Since I began this has come the enquiry after the author of the Children of the Forest or the Three Knights. I ... continue reading

To Alexander Macmillan
Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
Novr 22d 1864

Dear Mr Macmillan, I send both title page and the proof of the statuette, which is indeed most beautiful and suggestive. I wrote yesterday about the title page. I could not do so before as I only came home late on Saturday and the Sunday post goes early. I enclose the list of presentation copies

Yours sincerely C M Yonge

Will you be kind enough to send the sheets of the Golden Deeds to Messrs Williams & Norgate for ... continue reading

To Frances Awdry
Elderfield
Oct 22d [1887?]

My dear Frances

All I know about Juliana Coningsby is in the Cameo of December 1886. I got it out of Carte’s history also Knights, and they both took it from the King’s own account which Pepys wrote down at the time. The adventures were really more curious than Jane Lane’s and I have always wondered whether there were anything not told which prevented them from being made more of. But Carte is too old ... continue reading