Charlotte Yonge: Rereading Domestic Religious Fiction edited by Tamara S. Wagner (review)

Charlotte Yonge: Rereading Domestic Religious Fiction is a reprint of a recent special issue of Women’s Writing from August 2010, and it forms part of the noteworthy recent rediscovery of Charlotte Yonge. The very existence of this volume marks how far Yonge scholarship has come. As Tamara S. Wagner explains in her introduction, Yonge “has become a central figure in the reconsideration of simplistic dichotomies of feminist versus antifeminist writers” (2). And this collection succeeds in speaking to a new generation of scholars, providing “a critical forum for a reassessment that leaves behind the strictures of mere apologia or rehearsals of background material” (4).

It is also a sign of the growth of Yonge scholarship that well-defined areas of inquiry have emerged within Yonge studies. Today it is possible to have not only a special issue on Yonge but a special issue specifically on Yonge’s religious thought. This book should go on the shelf next to Gavin Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (2007), and i hope it provokes serious rethinking of realism from the point of view of typology and tractarian thought. Next to the religious studies, we can place two other recent books re-examining Yonge’s gender ideas: Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers (2009), also edited by wagner, which contains several articles on Yonge; and Susan walton’s Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (2010). Yonge has also attracted attention in disability studies, with important work by Martha Stoddard Holmes and wagner herself, and recent studies have begun to read her in terms of queer theory and colonialism.

Compared to gender, sexuality, race, and the body, Yonge’s religious thought may initially seem a rather stodgy topic, but the writers in Charlotte Yonge make a strong case that Yonge’s conservative beliefs derive from a particular practice of critical thought that fundamentally shaped the way she wrote. Her tractarian faith shaped everything from her vision of missionary masculinity, to her sense of what could be articulated in prose, to her use of typological symbolism, to her lessons about philanthropic ventures.

This is a volume whose contents are at a uniformly high level. Every article is substantial and interesting; every one contributes meaningfully to an emerging cadre of Yonge scholarship; and cumulatively, they convert (as it were) any skeptical reader. They fall into three main groups. First, there are the articles that rethink Yonge’s religious beliefs as the basis of her most intimate intellectual, literary, and narrative practices. In this category i would place Susan e. Colón’s “realism and reserve: Charlotte Yonge and tractarian Aesthetics,” which gives a fascinating account of the importance of writing with “reserve” for Yonge; and walton’s “Charlotte Yonge: Marketing the Missionary Story,” showing the ways in which Yonge’s attempts to shape the missionary story altered over the years that she was involved with the Melanesian Mission. Leslee thorne-Murphy’s article brings walton’s interests closer to home, looking at Yonge’s surprisingly skeptical fictional versions of local philanthropic efforts. Walton and thorne-Murphy together make a strong case that Yonge’s interest in Christian outreach was critical, careful, and nuanced. Mia Chen’s exploration of the fossil record in The Trial (1864) is equally surprising in that she reveals Yonge’s eagerness to grapple with geological time, rather than to deny it, drawing our attention to the way Yonge drew on Christian theories about evolutionary change.

Chen’s article is also characteristic of another major theme in this collection: reexaminations of Yonge’s literary techniques. These articles show how she structured her fiction and how she related to other women writers and genres of the century, from her Hampshire predecessor Jane Austen to her sensation-fiction contemporaries. Teresa Huffman Traver reveals how intricately the image of the church as a...