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To Anne Isabella Ritchie
Elderfield Otterbourne Winchester
May 8th [1894?]

MS Eton College, 2ALS to ATR

Dear Mrs Ritchie
How kind in you to write me such a pleasant letter. I like to know that the companions of my life have been beloved by other people. I had actually begun for my own pleasure another link in the Daisy Chain for the Monthly Packet but it was decided that it would weary the public.1

I am much enjoying your recollections. I hope you have a great many more still to come.

I was sorry this morning to find that the so called ‘Sara Tytler’ is in so much need of a pension. Mr Besant is sending round a petition for her.2 It seems strange that she should never have been able to make more than a £162 a year, when everyone knew her name, and her books are always wholesome and often clever, though in awkward language.

But publishers are inscrutable! I have just seen a MSS full of ability, and by a practised hand rejected by the publisher of Pretty Miss Smith where the uncle of an heiress tries to drive her out of her mind by letting owls loose in her bed room at night

However, I did not mean to write so much shop, only to say that if you are in these parts I should be delighted to see you and I am generally at home

Yours sincerely
C M Yonge

1This was The Long Vacation, a sequel to The Daisy Chain.
2Henrietta Keddie (1827-1914) was the author under the name 'Sarah Tytler' of more than seventy volumes of fiction, mainly for girls, from 1865; she applied to the Royal Literary Fund five times between 1894 and 1913.


Cite this letter


The Letters of Charlotte Mary Yonge(1823-1901) edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske.

URL to this Letter is: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/3263/to-anne-isabella-ritchie-2

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