1st Edition
Charlotte Yonge Rereading Domestic Religious Fiction
Charlotte Yonge, a dedicated religious, didactic, and domestic novelist, has become one of the most effectively rediscovered Victorian women writers of the last decades. Her prolific output of fiction does not merely give a fascinatingly different insight into nineteenth-century popular culture; it also yields a startling complexity. This compels a reappraisal of the parameters that have long been limiting discussion of women writers of the time. Situating Yonge amidst developments in science, technology, imperialism, aesthetics, and the book market at her time, the individual contributions in this book explore her critical and often self-conscious engagement with current fads, controversies, and possible alternatives. Her marketing of her missionary stories, the wider significance of her contribution to Tractarian aesthetics, the impact of Darwinian science on her domestic chronicles, and her work as a successful editor of a newly established magazine show this self-confidently anti-feminist and domestic writer exert a profound influence on Victorian literature and culture.
This book was previously published as a special issue of Women's Writing.
1. Introduction: Novelist with a Reserved Mission: The Different Forms of Charlotte Yonge Tamara S. Wagner 2. Realism and Reserve: Charlotte Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics Susan E. Colón 3. Charlotte Yonge: Marketing the Missionary Story Susan Walton 4. The Ship that Bears Through the Waves Teresa Huffman Traver 5. The Charity Pig: Altruism and Self-Deceit in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Stokesley Secret: or, How The Pig Paid the Rent Leslee Thorne-Murphy 6. "Never read anything that can at all unsettle your religious faith": Reading and Writing in The Monthly Packet Kristine Moruzi 7. Led Astray to be Newly Framed: Redeeming Sensational Fraud in Charlotte Yonge’s Epistolary Experiments Tamara S. Wagner 8. Emma in the 1860s: Austen, Yonge, Oliphant, Eliot June Sturrock 9. Disability and the Individual Talent: Adolescent Girlhood in The Pillars of the House and What Katy Did Elizabeth Hale 10. "To Face Apparent Discrepancies with Revelation": Examining the Fossil Record in Charlotte Yonge’s The Trial Mia Chen 11. Charlotte M. Yonge’s Bank Account: A Rich New Source of Information on Her Work and Her Life Charlotte Mitchell
Biography
Tamara S. Wagner specialises in Victorian literature. Recent books include Financial Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Plotting Money and the Novel Genre, 1815-1901 (2010) and Longing: Narratives of Nostalgia in the British Novel, 1740-1890 (2004), as well as collections on Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009) and Victorian Settler Narratives (forthcoming).
