Description
Book SynopsisThis interdisciplinary collection of essays explores the life and work of Charlotte M. Yonge, a highly influential and popular nineteenth-century writer who is emerging from a long period of critical neglect. Its wide-ranging chapters capture the scope and quality of current work in Yonge studies, addressing the full range of her prolific literary output from her best-selling novels to her nature writing, biographies, and letters. Considering themes from gender, disability, and empire, to Tractarianism, secularism, and the idea of progress, these essays consider how Yonge reflected and shaped the tastes, ideas and anxieties of her readers and contemporaries. Exploring her key role in the Anglican revival, her importance as a test case in the development of feminist criticism, and her formal innovativeness as a novelist, this collection places Yonge centrally in the nineteenth-century literary landscape and demonstrates her ongoing relevance to scholars and students of the period.
Table of Contents1. Charlotte M. Yonge and the Concept of Conservative Community - Rosemary Mitchell.-
2. A Woman’s Outlook: Charlotte Yonge’s Sense of Place - Julia Courtney.-
3. Charlotte M. Yonge, Empire and the Wider World - Terry Barringer.-
4. Charlotte M. Yonge and the Long Victorian Family: Instructing the “Mother-Sister” - Tamara Wagner.-
5. Disability and Bioethics in Yonge’s Novels - Martha Stoddard Holmes.-
6. “What I can myself remember”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Life Writing - Valerie Sanders.-
7. ‘Hard cash is a necessary consideration’: Money and Class in Charlotte M. Yonge’s Fictional Portrayals of Contemporary Family Life - Susan Walton.-
8. ‘A lady with a profession’: Governesses in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge - Clare Walker Gore.-
9. Providence and Progress: Science, Education and the Professions in Charlotte M. Yonge - Clemence Schultze.-
10. Charlotte M. Yonge and the Vocation of Childhood: Youth and Social Critique in Yonge’s novels - Gavin Budge.-
11. Changing Anglican Religious Practice, the Material Culture of Church Building, and the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge (William Whyte).-
12. Yonge’s Missions: At Home and Abroad - Barbara Dennis.-
13. “I am too high church and too narrow”: Charlotte M. Yonge and Alexander Macmillan - Ellen Jordan.-
14. Charlotte Yonge and Feminist Criticism - Talia Schaffer.
