REALISM AND TYPOLOGY IN CHARLOTTE M. YONGE'S THE HEIR OF REDCLYFFE

Extract

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.