Charlotte Mary Yonge and Tractarian Aesthetics

Charlotte Yonge's reputation rests upon her role as Tractarianism's leading novelist, but the sheer weight of her fiction has served to obscure other facets of her productive literary career and the role she believed prose to play in the Tractarian aesthetic.

Despite the much-bruited tale of the family conclave that decided, before the publication of her first novel, Abbeychurch, or Self-Control and Self-Conceit (1844), that it would only be permissible if any profit were devoted to charity, "it being thought unladylike to benefit by one's own writings,"¹ her brother's financial ruin in 1876 allowed her to assume openly the mantle of the professional author she had long been in all but name. One mark that distinguished the professional women writers of Yonge's generation was their willingness and ability to turn their hands to a variety of literary tasks. George Eliot had been a translator and reviewer before becoming a novelist and poet; the novelist, Margaret Oliphant, was also a translator, as well as reviewer, essayist, and biographer; the Brontë sisters' first venture into professional authorship took the form of a poetry collection; the poet, Christina Rossetti, tried out various forms of fiction early in her career, wrote several exegetical works, and expressed herself happy to take up literary biography.² Yonge had also diversified her output at an early stage, writing educational articles for magazines directed at the daughters of the working classes, as well as for the wealthy private schoolroom, in addition to a steady flow of fiction. In due course she became by turn historian, biographer, etymologist, and versifier, all the while acting as sole editor, from 1851 to 1893, of the Monthly Packet.

It was in this journal, in September 1892, that Yonge published an article of practical advice on writing as a profession for women.³ The comparative lack of distinction she makes as to whether the writer's genre is to be prose or poetry reflects, in part, the hybrid nature of many contemporary magazines and periodicals, and her lifelong habit of seeing the two as so intimately related that it came naturally to her to further Tractarian poetics through the medium of prose fiction. By the fin de siècle, the article noted, writing had become increasingly professionalized and thus a pre-publication apprenticeship was now advisable. Translation and careful letter-writing were useful exercises, but writing poetry was the basic building block for teaching "rhythmical expression" and accurate observation. Furthermore, without a sound knowledge of prosody, the aspirant writer's achievements would never become more than a pastime: "To put down verses as they rise in the mind or fancy, by the ear, is a very pleasant occupation, and even more, it often relieves the mind of strong feeling, whether high, meditative, or sorrowful."

The echo of John Keble's definition of the function of poetry as the "power of healing and restoring overburdened and passionate minds" was not accidental.⁴ It would indeed have been surprising if Yonge, who acknowledged Keble, author of The Christian Year (1827) and Oxford's Professor of Poetry (1831-1841), as one of the two great influences in her life, had not tried her hand at verse. Although it was not to prove her preferred métier, Yonge was a thoroughly proficient versifier, adept over a range that included both narrative and lyric poetry, and at ease with a variety of metrical forms. Despite, or perhaps because of this very facility, her poetry never yields up an unmistakably personal voice or timbre. In part this seems to have been dictated by her proficiency as a translator of others' poetry. In one sense Yonge's capacity to lose herself in the act of translation conformed to a mid-nineteenth-century preconception of woman's literary role as necessarily better suited to providing a secondary conduit for male intellect and creative energy: this ideologically determined formation doubtless gained further cogency from, and was in turn fed by, a middle and upper-class education differentiated according to gender. A male education that set such store by proficiency in the...