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 William Heathcote, Bt.
Elderfield
Feb 15th 1869
My dear Sir William, Julian and I have been looking over the plans in the Church, and find every proof (except Repton’s plan) that the history of the matter was as you believed. The original design was made out between Repton and my father, and Carter was employed to make the drawings but finding him not up the requirements of a taste so fastidious and minute as my father’s was, he (my father) collected examples, made designs, ... continue reading
To Miss Hutchins
[1880s, 1890s?]

Dear Miss Hutchins

I am so sorry I did not send these before. They came at a very busy time, and I am sorry to say I put them into a drawer with some Christmas cards and forgot them till Miss Cazenove reminded me.

Yours truly C M Yonge

... continue reading
To George Lillie Craik
Elderfield, Otterbourne, Winchester.
Sept 9th [1868]

Dear Mr Craik I send the lacking Cameo. I have found things needing correction in three sheets of the Chaplet of Pearls, and I am searching for a sentence that I know was spoilt for want of a not - but the whereabouts of which I can in no wise as yet discover. If I do not find it before tomorrow’s post, I shall send the sheets to you which I have corrected for you to ... continue reading

To Maria Edith Walker
Elderfield Otterbourne Winchester
Sept 22 1899

Dear Miss Walker I should like much to know your Grandmother’s name, in case I should have heard of her from my mother. The curious thing is that my mother had no idea that she was a success. She was very miserable at school, being really too delicate for the treatment of those days and never well in London. She thought her lessons were always marked ‘très mediocre’, and her comfort was watching ... continue reading