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 Mr Macmillan, Thanks for the books which the carrier will probably bring today. I will betake myself to St John’s pupils at once, though it is rather a sudden change from the banks of the Granicus, where I left Alexander.
And there is another thing that I should like to know ie - the sum that will come to me both for the Pupils of St John and the Danvers Papers. The reason I ask is ... continue reading
My dear Irene,
Many thanks for this order. You had better send the stamps to me, and they will go into the great Bell hoard.
Glow Worm’s Lorenzo is by far the most entertaining of the lot that came yesterday, but unluckily she made one sad mistake, for Catherine was the daughter of Alessandro, some generations further on, Lorenzo’s grandson, I think, and the monument was a grandson’s too commonly called Lorenzino. I am very sorry for ... continue reading
My dear Anne,
Thank you much and indeed for your letter which told so much that we wanted to know. I had not been able to gather what you had been doing, nor how it had come to you, and now uncle Yonge has written the most beautiful account to Mamma, of the last hours, so that we understand far better the closing in and extinction of hope upon them all. And oh! that beautiful ... continue reading