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 Innes Thank you for your kind letter, I suppose there will always be rubs of opinion when three people representing different generations of thought work together if in general principle they accord; and I know I am apt to despise popularity more than perhaps is fair in fellow workers to whom it is more important
As long as there is nothing irreverent tending to ‘Higher Criticism[‘] or to trenching on delicacy I am ... continue reading
My dear Miss Yonge
Will you kindly read the enclosed and if you approve of the petition will you kindly sign it and send it back to me here?
very truly yours Walter Besant
... continue readingSir
I have no photograph at hand that I can spare but you can procure one in the February number of ‘Men and Women of the Time’ or another from Elliot and Fay Baker Street.
I remain &c
C M Yonge
... continue readingMy dear Madam,
I must thank you for your two pretty notices, and tell you that they are come all quite right with the rest. I don’t know whether you will approve of one alteration I ventured to make of the name Chironia into Erythræa, for I found Sir James Smith, & the other modern botany books have changed the name, and say there is a decided distinction between the Chironia and Erythræa. I wish they ... continue reading