Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge's the Heir of Redclyffe

Abstract

RECENT ATTEMPTS at a critical recuperation of the fiction of Charlotte M. Yonge have largely sidestepped the issue of her work's commitment to a religious perspective. June Sturrock's brief 1995 monograph, “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge's Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate over Women, is focused on the way in which Yonge's Tractarian beliefs provided a framework within which a conservative feminist account of an independent social role for women could be articulated, but takes those beliefs themselves as givens. Catherine Sandbach-Dahlström's more substantial 1984 study, Be Good Sweet Maid: Charlotte Yonge's Domestic Fiction: A Study in Dogmatic Purpose and Fictional Form, whilst noting a relationship between apparent changes in Yonge's religious beliefs and differences in the form of her novels, is characterized by a formalist mode of interpretation which tends to bracket off the question of how Yonge presents religious belief in her novels from any wider context in Victorian religious thought.

Introduction

“…9 But if attention from such divergent approaches has ensured that Yonge has become one of the most effectively rediscovered authors of the last decades, this has only made it more prominent that critics have largely ''sidestepped the issue of her work's commitment to a religious perspective''. 10 Until recently, discussions of different gender roles in Victorian religion have tended to reference Yonge simply ''as an exemplar of the orthodox attitude'' as opposed to other women ''critiquing or rebelling against the 'crushing limitations of Victorian society'''. 11 She might have something interesting to say about working women and, specifically, writing women, about unduly stereotyped Victorian invalids, or about the culture clashes within a proliferating range of divergent denominations of Christianity at the time, but discussion of these separate issues is therein neatly set apart from her self-positioning in her world: in her belief system and in her understanding of the literary marketplace.…”