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...

Otterbourn
Jany 21st [1854]

Dear Miss Roberts, Carlisle Cathedral is a very pretty sketch, and will be very acceptable to the Monthly Packet, I think however it will be better to keep it for next year perhaps, if we and the Packet proceed and prosper as hitherto, so that it may be the opening of a series which promises to be very useful and interesting, I will consult a very good archaeologist at Winchester about the rugged [sic] staff ornament ... continue reading

Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
Aug 13th [1865]

Dear Mr Macmillan, Thanks, here are the receipts. I think I once got 5/ in like manner before from the Cape. I am not able yet to speak with any certainty of our plans. We have just offered ourselves to my uncle for the 8th of September, and there is such a vista of relations to stay with when once we get into Devonshire, that I do not think we shall come to London till the ... continue reading

Otterbourn
June 4th [1852]

My dear Madam We have had friends staying with us, and have been a good deal employed in shewing as much of our Cathedral &c as could be visited in two or three days, or else I should sooner have thanked you for the very pretty poem, which I received on Sunday morning. I like it very much, and will insert it as soon as I have space, I have not had so much German yet ... continue reading

TIGHT LACING Madam,- It has struck me that Associates might do well to warn their Members against tight-lacing. Two instances have fallen in my way lately which convince me that, though ladies have, thanks to sense and to bicycles, grown more sensible, the fashion plates staring one in the face on every hoarding make young girls imagine that a wasp waist is a beauty. One, whom nature intended to be as plump as a partridge, screwed herself ... continue reading