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...

[probably to Christabel Coleridge, secretary of the Gosling Society]

The first instalment of Barnacle is come

Yours affectionately C M Yonge

... continue reading

. . . all. She is doing her reading to me now which is not good for my writing. I hope you are keeping quiet and getting better

Your affectionate Sister C M Yonge

... continue reading
Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
Oct 6th [1868]
My dear Edith I longed to answer you sooner, but the press of letters seems to me to result in my not writing them, though strange to say I am quite well, and do not even feel the mischief a great sorrow generally leaves. I think the real shock was that day you were here in the spring, and there has been nothing but calm decay ever since, and I cannot compare the wrench now to ... continue reading
Otterbourne,
[late June or early July] 1884.
[To Mary Ann Moberly]

How little I thought when I met dear Joanna Patteson in your drawing-room that it was the last time I should see her! Fanny Patteson had come back, and is sure Joan knew and was thinking for others to the last. . . . I hope you are profiting by the splendid summer weather. I never knew a year of sweeter smells: the sheets of wild honeysuckle ... continue reading