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...
My dear Miss Jacob, I think the dream exceedingly beautiful, it went quite to my heart, and the vision of the mother saving the children was the pleasanter to meet with because I remember once talking it over with the dear Warden Barter, though whether I first heard it from him I cannot remember, at any rate it brought me his face and voice.
The only thing that I should have a shadow of doubt about is ... continue reading
My dear Mary That letter came to me with a request that I would forward it to Mr Arthur Yonge whom the writer had met 7 years before in New Zealand, by which I concluded he did not mean Arthur in America and I thought it would just meet him with you, but probably it will find him in time. Poor Annie Woollcombe, the deaths from illness seem sadder than those in battle, and yet ... continue reading
My dear Miss Abraham Another despairing search for a [discard?], not your papers, but the letter that went with one, and I think the more that the post must have lost the M.S. I see it was at a time when I was turned out of my usual sitting room by a new carpet, and I think the pamphlet may have gone among the accumulation that grows upon one
It is very unlucky
Yours truly C M Yonge
... continue readingDear Sir Do you know what it is to make the worst blunders in that which one knows so well as hardly to think real recollection worth while. This is the only way in which I can understand my own blunder about that hymn upon Sennacherib, which is not only home made - by my mother - but I have always heard every Sunday for more than twenty years.
I will send the July No of the ... continue reading