Reputation
Yonge's work was widely read and respected in the nineteenth century. Among her admirers were Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, William Ewart Gladstone, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Anthony Trollope. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones read The Heir of Redclyffe aloud to each other while undergraduates at Oxford University and "took medieval tastes and chivalric ideals as presiding elements in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Yonge's work was compared favourably with that of Trollope, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert and Emile Zola. So popular were her works that
A midshipman was able to supply from memory a missing page in his ship's copy of The Daisy Chain. An officer in the Guards, asked in a game of "Confessions" what his prime object in life was, answered that it was to make himself like Guy Morville, hero of The Heir of Redclyffe.
Q.D. Leavis wrote in 1944 that Yonge's work must be inferior because her life had been "peculiarly starved," and that her Christian beliefs were "only an ignorant idealization projected by an inhuman theory" that resulted in a "moral cramp in the developing consciousness." According to critic Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström, this "tendency to confuse the moral quality of Charlotte Yonge's view of life with the quality of her literary expression has constantly be-deviled her work." Yonge's work has been little studied, with the possible exception of The Heir of Redclyffe.
Read more about this topic: Charlotte Mary Yonge
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