Abstract
Yonge’s childhood autobiography is well known to scholars as a record of her parents’ influence and companionship with her cousins, but she also scattered autobiographical memories through a variety of formats throughout her life. Contextualising discussion within the broader field of nineteenth-century women’s life writing, this chapter argues that Yonge’s commitment to multiple forms of life writing not only suffused her fiction, but also flourished elsewhere, charting recurrent concerns in ways and places that are less familiar to readers. While material from Yonge’s childhood is often recycled in her work, this chapter shows how she frequently returned to its earliest days and still more distant experiences of rural communities riven by class antagonism.
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Notes
- 1.
Letters from Yonge are cited by addressee and date, from the online edition of Yonge’s letters edited by Charlotte Mitchell, Ellen Jordan and Helen Schinske: https://c21ch.newcastle.edu.au/yonge/.
- 2.
This unfinished ‘Autobiography’ is printed in C. Coleridge 37–119.
- 3.
- 4.
See also Courtney, Chap. 3, Sect. 2 in this volume.
- 5.
Mrs Yonge’s comment about Guy’s being like Mr (Richard Hurrell) Froude suggests that the Yonges had read the Remains, with its revealing and controversial inclusions of intimate diaries (Yonge to M. A. Dyson, 4 May 1850).
- 6.
Yonge was not only ‘Mother Goose’ to her Goslings, but ‘Mother in Israel’ for the Revd Canon Robert Moberly, who preached her funeral sermon (31 March 1901) at St Matthew’s Church, Otterbourne. This was a name claimed by Deborah (5 Judges), as one ‘from whom came the spiritual opening of the eyes, the spiritual formation and sustaining of character, of countless children in Christ’. (See Characters and Scenes, 213–18; the quoted passage at 214.)
- 7.
In Yonge’s The Two Sides of the Shield (1885) a copy of Holiday House is said to have been thrown into the sea by a nurse angry at being compared to the harsh Mrs Crabtree (54).
- 8.
Mysie Merrifield drops an umbrella through a glass roof during a similar game (The Two Sides of the Shield, 371–3).
- 9.
See Dennis, Chap. 10, Sect. 3 in this volume.
- 10.
See also Courtney, Chap. 3, Sect. 5 in this volume
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Sanders, V. (2022). ‘What I Can Myself Remember’: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Life Writing. In: Walker Gore, C., Schultze, C., Courtney, J. (eds) Charlotte Mary Yonge. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10672-9_2
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