Charlotte M Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (review)

Over the course of a sixty-year writing career, Charlotte Yonge published around 180 books, single-handedly edited the Monthly Packet, and was much admired by such contemporary luminaries as Tennyson and Kingsley. Yet this bestselling novelist, once declared a genius by Henry James, has fallen from both popular and critical favour in the years since her death in 1901. In this book, the first full-length critical study of the writer to date, Gavin Budge attempts to recuperate Yonge from the critical dismissal and accusations of antifeminism that have previously characterised many discussions of her work. In order to establish a more productive basis for critical discussion of her fiction, Budge argues that "it is necessary to understand the cultural implications of Yonge's extremely close relations with Tractarianism" (11). Although Yonge's connections with John Keble and Tractarianism, also known as the Oxford Movement and Anglo-Catholicism, are well known, this book goes further than previous studies in its rigorous, in-depth engagement with Tractarian aesthetics in relation to Yonge's fiction. Describing her first meeting with Keble in the 1830s as "undoubtedly the formative event of her life" (12), Budge argues that the extent to which Tractarian ideology informed Yonge's fiction in both formal and thematic ways has yet to be fully appreciated. By contextualising her novels within the work of such Tractarian intellectuals as J.H. Newman and E.B. Pusey, Budge asks us to reconsider our assumptions about Yonge's fiction and, consequently, our definitions of nineteenth-century realism and feminism.

In order to elucidate "the relationship between fictional technique and moral purpose" (102), Budge organises his study into three sections that broadly reflect the three aspects of the book's title. Section one, "Realism, Domestic Ideology and the Tractarian Psychology of Religion," introduces the book's methodology by making links between Tractarian approaches to literary interpretation and Yonge's fiction. Biblical typology in literary writing, in particular, is shown to be of crucial importance for both the Movement and Yonge. Despite this preoccupation, Budge challenges what he calls "the widely held modern critical assumption … that a religious or transcendent significance must necessarily be in conflict with the demands of realism" (16). This discussion about typology and realism is usefully advanced by the close analysis of Yonge's bestselling novel The Heir of Redclyffe, which forms the second section of the book. In the final section, Budge makes the case for the inherent feminism of the Tractarian Movement, which actively promoted nursing as a career and controversially sought to establish Anglican sisterhoods. Despite Yonge's frequent pronouncements as to the natural inferiority of women, Budge argues that the domestic world in her novels may be the location of much greater power than is often assumed if read in the context of Tractarian domestic ideology.

Of course, Yonge will be best known to VPR readers as the editor of the Monthly Packet, the periodical for "young ladies" that she single-handedly edited for forty years. For Budge, the Monthly Packet is an indispensable resource. His arguments are frequently and persuasively backed up by reference to articles, stories, and comments from the periodical, which offer further insight into Yonge's thoughts on excessive novel reading, for example, or on her responsibilities as an author. In his discussion of the extensive use of typology in her novels, he argues that readers of the Monthly Packet were already trained to read and interpret symbolic detail along typological lines. These moments help ground the study amidst the more dense passages on Tractarian aesthetics, which occasionally threaten to shift the book's focus away from Yonge. Having said that, readers may be disappointed initially that more periodical material is not directly quoted, although full references to appropriate articles are provided. The final third of the book, however, finds material from the Monthly Packet featuring more extensively, such as lengthy quotations from the regular column "Conversations on...