Swallowing the pills with the jam

Claudia Fitzherbert

CHARLO 1 YONGE by Alethea Hayter Northcote House, £7.99, pp. 81 Charlotte M. Yonge, the Victorian novelist prolific even by the standards of her age, has not been well treated by Posterity. None of her novels is now in print, a circumstance inexplicable to all those who know and love her work. In her best books, sprawling family chronicles such as The Daisy Chain (1856), Hopes and Fears (1860) and Pillars of the House (1873), Yonge takes a huge cast of charac- ters from childhood to adulthood, and often unto death, and makes gripping narratives out of their crises of religious faith and filial duty. She also wrote a number of historical novels for children and some for adults, producing a total of more than 160 books between 1838 and her death in 1901.

In her day Yonge enjoyed mass following and critical acclaim. Both have fallen away. In 1944 Queenie Leavis, in a review of Georgina Battiscombe's Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life (1943), dismissed Yonge as having

nothing to present but a moral ethos where everybody's first duty is to give up everything for everybody else and where no one can enjoy anything without feeling guilty.

Alethea Hayter, quoting from Leavis's diatribe, observes mildly that it 'represents the, nadir to which Miss Yonge's work fell in critical esteem'.

Certainly it is hard to imagine Hayter's scholarly monograph — which appraises Yonge's literary career and critical response to her work with such elegance and brevity that one wonders why books are ever longer — being attacked with the same virulence. It is no longer fashionable to feel guilty about enjoying the Victorians on guilt; also women's studies departments have burgeoned since the Leavises held their puritanical sway, one of the results of which is that there is now, and has been for some time, a predisposition to regard forgotten female chroniclers of times gone by as interesting, if nothing else.

Charlotte Mary Yonge belongs to a noble tradition of spinster novelists. She lived her entire life in the Hampshire village of Otterbourne, where she was born in 1823. She was educated at home by her father, a High Church, staunchly Tory Waterloo veteran, and at the age of 15 she was prepared for confirmation by John Keble, rector of the neighbouring parish of Hursley and her father's closest friend. Keble's influence on the clever, shy school- girl was profound — she imbibed the principles of tractarianism and spent the rest of her life propagating them through her fiction. Hayter is illuminating on the ways in which the preoccupations of Yonge's characters 'fill up a whole rich picture of 19th-century ecclesiastical change', but also points out that her novels are perfectly accessible to those ignorant of the history of the Church of England's reli- gious revival:

Where a novelist today might use reactions to such events as redundancy, divorce or drug addiction to illustrate character devel- opment, Miss Yonge used loss of faith, con- version to Rome, or worldly cynicism for the same purpose, and imbued them with quite as much excitement and readability.

Yonge wrote to improve, but many of her readers, even in her own day, were hooked by her narrative gifts rather than her spiritual message. Dickens may have condemned her `Pusey-stricken fancies', but Tennyson had her measure completely. Francis Palgrave recalled a walking tour on Dartmoor with Tennyson during which the laureate was unable to stop reading The Young Stepmother (1861) even while they rambled. The Young Stepmother is typical of those of Yonge's novels which take mar- riage as a central theme — the plot turns on the heroine's husband learning to be worthy of his God-ordained place as head of the household. The husband in question, the middle-aged Mr Kendal, has never been confirmed, a symptom of the unthink- ing indolence which mars an otherwise amiable character. To return to Palgrave's anecdote: the walkers shared a room at an inn, where Tennyson, much to his bed- fellow's discomfort, continued reading late into the night. 'I see land!' Palgrave heard Tennyson cry in the early hours of the morning. 'Mr Kendal is just going to be confirmed', and at last their bedside candle was snuffed.

Tennyson was one of many sophisticated contemporary admirers of Yonge's best- sellers. George Eliot read The Daisy Chain aloud to G. H. Lewes in Florence. Glad- stone, Kingsley and Trollope all praised The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) — which novel two years later was found to be the favourite reading of officers wounded in the Crimea.

But Yonge's core readership was young women, and it was young women whom she strove consciously to influence. When she completed her first novel at the age of 21 she was grilled by her father on her motives for publishing. There were, he said, three reasons for doing so — love of vanity, or gain, or the wish to do good. The young author replied, with tears, 'I really hoped I had written with the purpose of being use- ful to young girls like myself.' There are numerous testimonies to her success: Ethel May, the clever, spirited heroine of The Daisy Chain who learns to embrace, after a struggle, the role of home daughter to her widowed father and to accept that the unmarried woman 'must be ready to cease in turn to be the first with any', inspired hordes of young women to do as she did and work for the Church in their free time.

It is perhaps a consequence of Yonge's success in persuading her contemporary female readers of the value of self-sacrifice that she has been given, in general, such a rough ride by feminist critics. Early attacks on her 'defensive cult of filial obedience' have given way to slightly more sympathet- ic recent attempts to read in her books a muted message of revolt against female submission. Hayter argues that this has proved uphill work: Her intention is so avowed, so consistently pursued, so congruous with everything that is known about her life and work, that the search for hidden agendas is apt to be a fruit- less . . pursuit. Readers today may not share her beliefs, but any attempt to show that she herself did not really hold them sim- ply disintegrates, rather than deconstructs, her work.

Certainly it makes no sense to reclaim Yonge as a woman trying vainly to cast off bonds of patriarchy. Anyone who can write that she has 'no hesitation in declaring the inferiority of woman, nor that she brought it upon herself, as Yonge did, must be allowed to have=been fairly unequivocal on the woman question. Yet there is no reason at all not to reclaim her heroines. Yonge's real strength as a novelist lay in her charac- ters — in the way that they are seen to change and develop in the course of her books. Yonge's joyful endorsement of Ethel May's transformation does not pre- vent the modern reader from weeping at Ethel's sacrifice, and cursing the May men- folk for their unthinking selfishness and greed.

This is one area in which I disagree with Hayter, who argues that there is no ques- tion, in reading Yonge,

of extracting the pills and then enjoying the jam; the mixture is more like an antibiotic in liquid cordial; the reader cannot swallow one without the other, and may not notice that he is being dosed as well as stimulated.

This suggests that Yonge still has the power to turn young women away from books and lovers and ambition, back towards their rotten fathers and intemper- ate husbands. Yet I have always found the opposite to be the case. Whenever I have doubts about feminism, about where we have got to and where we are going, I return to The Davy Chain, and emerge refreshed and inspired and ready to do battle once more with any fool who dares suggest that the time has come to tinker with the clockwork of the woman's move- ment.