"Scenes from the Life of a Spinster"

Hopes and Fears, Charlotte M. Yonge  (TBR shelves, 2017)

It has been a while since I've read one of Charlotte Yonge's Victorian morality doorstoppers. The last I read, Nuttie's Father, ended with the death of a child who had been lured from home and so badly treated that he did not survive long after his rescue. As I have noted before, death is ever present in Yonge's books, and it is often treated as a happy end to a character's life. On the other hand, it can be a punishment for a character's misdeeds, which is particularly jarring when it is not the doer of the deeds who dies, but someone in his or her orbit, who then becomes a lesson to the misbehaving one. I found it hard to accept the child's death in Nuttie's Father as a happy ending for anyone, and it put me off her books for a time.

I don't know why I thought it was good idea to pick another of her books in the middle of my construction project, but my exasperation with her characters did offset my frustration with the project delays. (It is finally completed, and I am replacing books on shelves and enjoying the downstairs again.) The project was finished before the book, actually, which I attribute to its 569 pages of very small print in my 1899 reprint. Hopes and Fears was originally published in 1864, nine years after Yonge's bestseller The Heir of Redclyffe. She published so many books that I find the lists of her titles a bit overwhelming. I picked this one back in 2017, after finishing The Three Brides, for the subtitle: "Scenes from the Life of a Spinster." As a spinster myself, I am predisposed to read stories that feature single women - and Charlotte Yonge herself remained unmarried all her life.

The spinster in question is Honora Charlecote, who to my surprise was not the heroine of the book. The daughter of a clergyman with an old historic house in a commercial district of London, she often visits her cousin Humfrey Charlecote. He lives at his beautiful estate, Hiltonbury, where he conscientiously carries out the duties of a country squire, doing much good in the neighborhood. A decade or more older than Honora, he proposes to her one summer day when they meet in his woods. She tells him she has an understanding with Owen Sandbrook, one of her father's curates who is going out as a missionary to Canada. Waiting patiently for him at home, she later learns that he has married the daughter of an army officer. He returns with her to England, becomes a popular city preacher, and then loses his wife and infant daughter, leaving him with a daughter and son. And he himself has developed one of those ominous coughs that means he must leave England for the warmth of Italy. Honora eagerly volunteers to take charge of his children, Lucilla and Owen. His daughter is devastated when he dies abroad, and she resents and blames Honora, who has fallen under the spell of the younger Owen. We are told more than once that she made a idol of him, and moreover, her faith is not true trust and reliance on God. All of this happens in the first three chapters.

Over the following 32 chapters, we follow Honora and the two young people as they grow older and make a lot of mistakes, and several more people are written into their story. After the death of Humfrey, Honora inherits his estate and responsibilities, but in trust for his heir (when located). There are rumors of a Canadian branch of the family, but no one actually goes looking for them. The younger Owen grows up with expectations, despite being told pretty clearly that he is not a Charlecote and cannot inherit. Lucilla prefers her mother's family, the worldly Charterises. They also becomes friends with the neighboring Fulmort family, whose wealth comes from their distillery business in London, where their "gin palaces" in Honora's neighborhood are turning it into a slum. One of the Fulmort children, Robert, gives up his inheritance to become a priest (High Anglican of course), building a mission church and school in the area, to offset the evils his family is perpetrating there.

Robert is in love with Lucilla, and she inclines to him. But when she decides to go on a fishing holiday in Ireland with only her cousin Horatia Charteris, he decides that he cannot marry a woman who would act so inappropriately. She assumes her influence over him is strong enough to draw him back to her, but she learns her mistake and has many, many pages to regret it, not to mention the miserable trip among the uncouth Irish. Owen meanwhile makes a secret and imprudent marriage that leaves him with a child and a very unsuitable mother-in-law. Yonge takes several swipes at her evangelical faith along the way. Their father left very little money. Owen squanders his, so Lucilla uses hers to pay his debts and then becomes a governess. Eventually she develops that significant little cough. Owen meanwhile goes off to Canada to become a surveyor. From the first hint of that, I was waiting for him to meet the North American Charlecotes.

In every one of Charlotte Yonge's books that I have read, there has been at least one character with a physical disability, who lives a full and complete life, with their physical conditions handled very matter-of-factly. I was still surprised to find a character here, Maria Fulmort, who is mentally challenged. Her older sister Phoebe is devoted to her, and Maria has made great progress under the latest governess, Miss Fennimore, who accommodates her limitations. Unfortunately, the governess has infected the middle of these three sisters, Bertha, with her science-based agnosticism. Maria is presented quite sympathetically, with interests and abilities that her sisters and Miss Fennimore encourage. Besides Lucilla's unhappy years as a governess, and Miss Fennimore's career, there is a third governess, Miss Wells, who becomes Honora's companion and chaperone, living out a comfortable retirement with a beloved former pupil.

In the end, I enjoyed this long, drawn-out story for the characters, which I think is one of Charlotte Yonge's strengths. The number of deaths in this book was surprisingly low in the end. Most of those with the consumption coughs were still alive when the story finally ended with a wedding, and several pages of moralizing about the proper way to raise a child in godliness, wherein Honora admits her errors. I was a little startled that the drawing of blood through cupping occurs more than once. I didn't realize doctors were still prescribing that in the 1860s. There is also a reference to a cholera outbreak, which the breezes will cure by dispelling the miasmas. I had to check the date of John Snow's discovery of the infected pump in London (via The Ghost Map), which was in 1854. Maybe Charlotte Yonge hadn't yet accepted the new science.

Unlike my experience with Nuttie's Father, this book of Charlotte Yonge's has left me more inclined to read the four others I still have stockpiled on the TBR shelves.

The Three Brides, by Charlotte M. Yonge

Charlotte M. Yonge really puts her characters - and her readers - to the test. The last book of hers I read, The Pillars of the House, began with a poverty-stricken family of eleven children (one crippled with a "diseased ancle-joint"), a tubercular father, and a frail mother (pregnant, as it turns out, with twins, her second set). I knew from the first page I was in for serious drama (if not melodrama), but also for a good story. Her strong characters and easy narration make her books so very readable.

This book, published in 1876, opens at the home of Julia Charnock Poynsett, a widowed mother of five sons (and two more lost in infancy). She is confined to her room after a riding accident some years ago. Her three eldest sons have recently married, one after the other, and the brides of the title are coming to meet their new family for the first time. Raymond, the eldest and heir to his mother's property, has married his second cousin Cecil Charnock, the only child of the head of the senior branch of the family. Julius, recently named rector of the parish, has married Lady Rosamond, the daughter of a impoverished Irish earl, an army officer whose family has traveled the globe with him. The third son, Miles, is a sailor who has sent Anne, the wife he met and married in the South African bush, home while he completes his tour of duty. Two unmarried sons are at home, preparing for careers, Frank in business and Charlie in the army. Though they will soon be gone, the other sons and their wives will be living together with their mother, who is "lady of Compton Poynsett in her own right," holding the property and the purse strings. Now, isn't that a perfect recipe for family drama? Add in a missing cousin accused of embezzlement, a young curate who'd rather be playing cricket, a thwarted young romance, and an epidemic, and you've got a real page-turner.

Julius, the third son, and the rector, is introduced matter-of-factly as an albino. It is mentioned in passing, as a family trait, with a cousin sharing his white hair but not his "coral" eyes. I have noted before that Charlotte Yonge is the first Victorian novelist I have read to include characters with disabilities so fully in her stories. In The Pillars of the House, the young woman with the diseased ankle decides to have her foot amputated and gets fitted with a cork foot, giving her much more freedom of movement. That really surprised me - I always think of surgery as a last resort for the Victorians, and I hope to heaven she had chloroform - though it made sense to and for the character. Here Julius is a strong, virtuous, spiritual character, as one would expect a parson to be in Yonge's novels. He has married a woman of rank, who is also beautiful and kind - and it's clearly a love match on both sides. She doesn't seem to have boggled at his appearance, and neither does anyone else, except his new sister-in-law Anne - but she has the excuse of being ill after a long voyage. I find this simple acceptance and integration of people with disabilities into families and communities really interesting.

If Charlotte Yonge seems progressive in that area, she is certainly of her time when it comes to women's roles. The story of the three brides isn't just of their adjustment to marriage or their new family. Each also has to change, to grow in her proper womanly role. Cecil is spoiled and too caught up in family pride. She also resents her mother-in-law's control of the household (however lightly exercised), and the close relationship she has with her sons. Rosamond is too frivolous and lazy for a rector's wife, though her warm heart makes up for almost everything. Poor Anne comes off the worst initially. Sickly, terrified of everything new, she is also rigid in her church doctrine and very judgmental of the family. She even asks if Julius the model rector is really a Christian. I started to wonder if Miles just married her because she was the first woman he'd seen after a long voyage! But eventually she relaxes a bit and becomes much more human.

The question of the proper role and place of women plays a big part in the book. Cecil, bored with playing second fiddle to her mother-in-law, takes up with the local black sheep of the neighborhood (without knowing the lady was previously engaged to her husband, a fact the reader learns in the first few pages). Lady Tyrrell has gathered some very dubious people around her, including an American woman who lectures on The Equality of the Sexes and Women's Rights. Charlotte Yonge has no time for either. Like the saintly Mrs. Poynsett, she would probably say that she had all the rights she needed. Several characters, women as well as men, argue for role of women as Angel in the House, secluded away lest any corruption of the world touch them to make them unfit for the sacred duties of wives and mothers. There is a lot of talk of women's "pure" spirits. The American Mrs. Tallboys, from "the other Cambridge," with her complacent and largely silent husband, is clearly set up as a straw-woman here.

A second major plot element involves the evils of horse-racing. An annual race-meeting is held in the neighborhood. As the local Member of Parliament, Raymond is a subscriber. Julius sets himself against it from the first, though Rosamond loves the excitement of a meet. The right-minded characters discuss the problems, not so much with racing itself, but with the betting, and with the low-life characters that are drawn to it. Several characters are addicted to gambling, and family fortunes have been lost. Despite these examples, and all the well-reasoned arguments Yonge's characters present, it takes a large-scale tragedy to finally convince at least the upper classes to give up the races.

Actions have consequences, in Charlotte Yonge's stories, and people pay for their mistakes and bad choices. Sometimes they pay with their lives. Sometimes it is innocent bystanders who pay. I never start one of her books without wondering which character - or how many - will be dead by the book's end. Someone always will - and she usually presents that as a "happy" ending, a reward. Here at least she spares one attractive young man, though she takes him to the very brink of death. I peeked ahead to the end of that chapter, because I was so sure he wasn't going to make it.

Despite my occasional frustrations with Yonge's books, I enjoy them very much. (Heartsease was my least favorite, of those I have read so far.) She is more earnest, less fun, less satirical, than Anthony Trollope or Margaret Oliphant, but I do find her books addictive. I've been lucky finding reprints on-line, particularly in "three-and-sixpenny" Macmillan editions from the 1880s and 1890s, which are surprisingly affordable. My copy of The Pillars of the House came in two volumes, a genuine "double-decker"! Somehow these escaped the general purge of Victorian literature in World War II that seems to have struck the women authors particularly hard. It's a joy to hold and read these old books.

Edited to add: I had almost forgotten about my Century of Books! Now I can fill in another year.

An unfortunate marriage into an unhappy family - or, The Brother's Wife

Heartsease, Charlotte M. Yonge

Reading this 1854 novel was a somewhat surreal experience, because I couldn't figure out the arc of the story, what it was really about.  It took me much longer than it should have to recognize this as a story of repentance and redemption.  The subtitle is "The Brother's Wife," and it begins with an unfortunate marriage. Arthur Martindale, the second son of Lord Martindale and an officer in the Coldstream Guards, has been maneuvered into marriage with the daughter of an unscrupulous country attorney, whom he met on holiday.  He stands to inherit little from his father, a fact he conceals from his father-in-law.  He marries his Violet on her sixteenth birthday, knowing that his family will disapprove of the match, but counting on his wife's sweetness and beauty to win them over.

There will be mild spoilers below.

At first I thought this was going to be a story of marriage and family life, particularly when Violet becomes pregnant almost immediately.  On one level it is, but the story spends nearly as much time on her sister-in-law Theodora, an independent and arrogant young woman, who blames Violet for the marriage and for stealing her brother's affection.  Violet has no idea what a strained family she has married into.  It is ruled by Lady Martindale's Aunt Nesbit, who holds her fortune over their heads.  She raised the orphaned Lady Martindale and and made her match with the cash-poor Lord Martindale.  She demands all of her adopted daughter's time and attention, leaving the rest of the family to fend for themselves.  She also vetoed the older son John's engagement to the curate's daughter Helen, forcing them into a long engagement.  Though they had little hope of marriage, Helen's early death was a shock to John, whose own health is not strong, and he has been absorbed in his grief and weakness ever since.

John finds himself drawn (in a perfectly brotherly way) to his teenaged sister-in-law, who nearly dies in childbirth, her son with her.  He even talks to her about Helen.  As she recovers they have many conversations about spiritual as well as practical matters.  Though Violet has good principles, she has no real religious feeling.  John encourages her to read the Bible and to think about prayer as more than just a formula of words.  Her maturing faith and confidence in God help her through the trials of life (including the births of three more children in quick succession).  They also guide her in dealing with her husband's family, particularly Theodora.  By her words and example, they are all eventually converted - not in the sense of accepting Christ - but in changing their lives, abandoning bad habits, loving and caring for one another.  As one character says, late in the story, "The history of these years is this. Every one has acted, more or less, idiotically. She has gone about softening, healing, guarding, stirring up the saving part of each one's disposition."

Of course Violet does all this in the proper womanly way, patiently enduring, her soft voice never scolding, her eyes often overflowing, her prayers unceasing.  She also raises a little saint in her oldest son Johnnie, who converts his wayward father by talking to him of the Good Shepherd.  I really came to appreciate the tempestuous Theodora, who erupts through the story like Jo March, even when I realized that she too would have to be tamed down.  But I also appreciated that everyone was in need of conversion, even the slightly saintly John.  He had to be shaken out of his own self-absorption in grief and illness, so that he could help Violet in her difficulties, so that she in turn could save the rest of the family.

I admit, I found this book tough going at times.  It was a relief to set it aside to read something more modern for a book group, though curiosity did draw me back to it afterwards.  In part, I was waiting to see who was going to die in the course of the story.  There were at least four candidates: the constantly pregnant Violet, the two brothers with bad hacking coughs, and the sickly but saintly Johnnie.  But really, the important death came before the story even began: Helen's - yet she still plays a crucial role in it.

This is the fourth of Charlotte Yonge's novels that I have read, and it was not my favorite.  I found The Clever Woman of the Family and The Heir of Redclyffe much more lively and interesting, though this story does have its dramatic moments (a house fire and two death-bed scenes, for a start).  I thought perhaps it was because this is an early book, that she learned to balance her moralizing better in later books.  But then I discovered that this was written the year after The Heir of Redclyffe, which seems to negate my theory.  I will say though that Charlotte Yonge knew how to create interesting three-dimensional characters, and that's what really kept me turning the pages of this long book.  I wanted to know what happened to these people, how their stories turned out.

The copy I read is an 1897 reprint, from Macmillan and Company.  It has a small sticker inside the front cover from the D.B. Friend and Company bookstores, in Brighton and Hove.  It also has an inscription: "Violet D. Reeves, from Mother, September 13, 1897."  My copy of The Daisy Chain, in a similar Macmillan edition, also has an inscription from a mother to her daughter.  I can just imagine generations of women passing these novels along, sure of their moral and spiritual worth.

Clever women

The Clever Woman of the Family, Charlotte M. Yonge

Devoted myself to Miss Yonge's last novel, The Clever Woman of the Family; her best, I think, since Heartsease.  She has no great creative or constructive power; she can produce but two finished portraits of woman-kind (Amy and Laura in The Heir of Redclyffe, Lady Temple and Rachel Curtis in this last book, Violet and her sister-in-law in Heartsease), but all she writes is pure, refined, womanly, healthy, and wholesome beyond the work of any living novelist.  Anthony Trollope comes next . . .   - George Templeton Strong, diary entry, July 13, 1865.

Over the past week I have also devoted myself to this book.  I've now read three of Charlotte Yonge's novels, and I like each one better than the last.  I can't agree with Strong that she has "no great creative or constructive power."  This story is more complex than either The Daisy Chain or The Heir of Redclyffe, with a larger cast of characters and a mystery to be unraveled at its heart.  It is the story of two sets of sisters, one set of brothers, and a brother and sister.  The "clever woman" of the title is Rachel Curtis, who is introduced in the first chapter, living with her older sister Grace and their widowed mother in the seaside town of Avonmouth (standing in for Exmouth).  Their estate, The Homestead, of which Grace and Rachel are joint heiresses, includes much of the land around the town, which is becoming popular as a winter resort.  Rachel has just turned 25, and she longs to be doing something to improve the lives of the local people, particularly the girls who are apprenticed too young to lace-making.  She want a purpose, a mission.  She spends her spare time in study, but she has no one to discuss and debate with, no one to guide her reading, which has made her rather dogmatic and overbearing.  People agree with her to escape confrontation, or they just avoid her conversation all together.

A mission soon comes to hand with a letter announcing the impending arrival of her cousin Fanny and her family from India.  The daughter of a soldier, Fanny went out to join her parents in South Africa when she was 16.  At her father's death, which quickly followed her arrival, she married his old friend Sir Simon Temple, aged 60 to her 16.  Now, nine years later, Sir Simon has died, and Fanny is returning to England as Lady Temple, with seven children, including a new-born daughter, Stephana.  (There is also a son named Leoline, though the others have more usual names).  Rachel determines to take charge of the widow and her children, appointing herself tutor to the boys and chaperone to the mother.  The boys do not take kindly to her regime, and gentle Lady Temple is quick to defend and excuse them.  Rachel, finding her theories of education and child management falling short of the reality of six troublesome boys, agrees to give up  charge of them to a new governess.

Fortunately, there is a candidate close at hand in Alison Williams.  She and her sister Ermine live in a small cottage with their niece Rose.  Ermine, the elder, is in a wheelchair, having suffered terrible burns in an accidental fire that left her unable to walk.  She spends much of her time caring for Rose, a winsome child of seven, the daughter of their brother Edward.  In the second great tragedy of their family, Edward was accused of fraud, in connection with an industrial process that he was developing, and fled to the Continent.  Alison and Ermine have been ostracized by their family for insisting on his innocence.  In their poverty and isolation, the offer of a position with the Temples comes as a great relief.  Alison handles her new charges very easily, and she gets on well with Lady Temple.  Rachel, meanwhile, finds herself drawn to Ermine, recognzing in her a well-read, educated, thinking person, with a deeper understanding than Rachel herself.  Ermine listens patiently to Rachel's theories and dogmas, but she isn't afraid to challenge, and she will not be intimidated or overborne.  Rachel learns from one Williams sister as the Temple boys do from the other.

Though she gives up charge of the boys, Rachel still feels herself the guardian of their young mother (like Rachel, aged 25).  Lady Temple is good-hearted, simple and generous.  Though she is determined never to marry again, having loved Sir Stephen deeply and sincerely mourning him, Rachel keeps a suspicious eye on every man who comes near her.  She particularly resents Colonel the Hon. Colin Keith, whom Sir Stephen made the guardian of his family with Fanny's Aunt Curtis.  Fanny depends on him for everything, she refers all questions to him, especially those involving the boys.  Rachel also keeps a close eye on the Colonel's distant cousin Captain Alexander Keith.  Alick served under Fanny's father, and his sister Bessie, who also knew the family, comes to stay with Lady Temple.  Rachel, suspecting every man of designs on Lady Temple, never notices that both men have other reasons for staying in Avonmouth.

I did enjoy this book, for its twisty plot but also for its characters.  I felt for Rachel, who like Jo March in Little Women has great energy and talents, but no real outlet for them.  According to the introduction, this book addresses the problem of "surplus women" in British society in the mid-19th century, when "women outnumber men to such an extent that not all women can expect to marry."  Rachel does not plan to marry, but to work at some mission, once she discovers the proper one.  At age 25, she considers herself past the marrying age anyway, a point of view not shared by her older sister Grace.  Alison Williams is another young woman who has made a career as a governess instead of marrying.  But as much as I enjoyed this book, it also left me a little uneasy, because more than any other 19th-century novelist I've read, Yonge makes her characters pay for their mistakes, their sins, and retribution falls heavily on the women.  Perhaps that is why 19th-century readers like George Templeton Strong saw her books as so "pure, refined, womanly, healthy and wholesome."  In this book, one character's misbehavior leads to her death, and another's mistakes cost the life of a child.

I was also uncomfortable with Yonge's insistence that women's intellect, and even their souls, must be guided and shaped by the men in their lives.  Here is another parallel with Little Women: Rachel must find her Professor Bhaer, to tone down her stridency, to make her realize that she is not as educated and well-informed as she thinks she is.  In the end, it takes two mentors, one of whom helps her find again the faith that she thought lost to rationalism.  "And after all, unwilling as she would have been to own it, a woman's tone of thought is commonly moulded by the masculine intellect, which, under one form or another, becomes the master of her soul."  As a 21st-century woman with an unmastered soul, I am absolutely unwilling to own that.

And yet in other ways this book is surprisingly progressive.  Yonge also gives us Ermine Williams, a truly clever woman, who seems to have succeeded where Rachel failed in shaping herself without a master.  And Yonge gives us not one but two characters, physically maimed and handicapped, both of whom are loved and marry happily.  One character even has a home prepared and made handicap-accessible.  A third character, Alick and Bessie's uncle Mr. Clare, is blind but still continues as rector of a parish, with the help of a curate.  I can't think of another 19th-century novel that I have read where anything like this happens - where physically disabled characters can be central and heroic while also living normal lives.  In another unexpected twist for a novel of this time, Yonge makes one of the male characters - again, a central and heroic one - a tender and devoted nurse, much in demand.

Admist all the discussion of serious reading, I was tickled to find two of my favorite characters are fans of Anthony Trollope.  Alick Keith is visiting his uncle, to whom he often reads aloud.  Mr. Clare asks, "You have not by chance got Framley Parsonage?"   Alick tells him no, but that they will get a copy.  Mr. Clare goes on to say, "Bessie has it.  She read me a very clever scene about a weak young parson bent on pleasing himself; and offered to lend me the book, but I thought it would not edify Will Walker [his curate]."  Instead, they settle down to read Silas Marner.

I was so surprised and happy to find this book at Half Price Books.  I always look in the "Y" section at used-book stores but without much hope, since so few of Yonge's books have been reprinted and they are very hard to find.  The edition I found is from the Broadview Press, which has published many 19th-century novels in editions like this one, which has not just an introduction by a professor of English, Clare Simmons, but also appendicies with supplementary information on Yonge herself, on the "Surplus Women" question, and some background historical information (on the British army in the period of the novel, for example).  I have since discovered that my copy of Margaret Oliphant's autobiography is also a Broadview edition.  I can only hope that they will continue to reprint women writers, and I am hoping specifically for more of Yonge's novels (which are available as e-texts; I still prefer print).

The Classics Challenge: July and lasting impressions

For the July round of her Classics Challenge, Katherine at November's Autumn asks us to recall the lasting impressions that classic works have left on us, and to look that what we have read this year: "What is a moment, quote, or character that you feel will stay with you? Years from now, when some of the details have faded, that lasting impression the book has left you with... what is it? --or why did it fail to leave an impression?"

The character who has stayed with me most vividly is from the very first book that I posted about for this challenge, back in January: Philip Morville from Charlotte M. Yonge's The Heir of Redclyffe. I found him one of the most insufferable characters that I have ever come across in all my years of reading. He quite easily could have been a hero: a gentleman, handsome, gifted, intelligent and well-educated, with strong principles. He has many virtues, but they are outweighed by his pride and sense of superiority, which lead him to lecture and patronize even his elders. Yet Philip is also a disappointed man, destined for university and a gentleman's life, but left at his father's death without resources. Much against his inclination he has had to make his career in the army instead. This disappointment makes him resent his cousin Guy Morville, the heir of the title, who holds wealth and a title that Philip sometimes covets. Occasionally he seems to recognize in himself a fault or a weakness, and his usual reaction is to point the finger at someone else, often Guy, his most frequent target.

Philip had been used to feel men's wills and characters bend and give way beneath his superior force of mind. They might, like Charles, chafe and rage, but his calmness always gave him the ascendant almost without exertion, and few people had ever come into contact with him without a certain submission of will or opinion. With Guy alone it was not so; he had been sensible of it once or twice before; he had no mastery, and could no more bend that spirit than a bar of steel. This he could not bear, for it obliged him to be continually making efforts to preserve his own sense of superiority.

I had to make my own continual effort to remember that Philip was a fictional character, so immensely did he irk me. I enjoyed the ways that other characters in the book, who found him just as irritating, would bait and challenge him. I also enjoyed watching his story play out. Based on his eventual fate, I doubt that he was Charlotte Yonge's favorite character either.

The heirs of Redclyffe

The Heir of Redclyffe, Charlotte M. Yonge

The Heir of Redclyffe was published in 1853.  An immediate best-seller, it went through five editions that year and was reprinted year after year through the 19th century.  Charlotte Yonge was 30 at the time, already an established author, and she would go on to write ninety other books, including another best-seller, The Daisy Chain.  But it was The Heir of Redclyffe that made her one of the most popular and influential authors of the Victorian age.  Now, however, her books are difficult to find, and she seems to be much less well known than Elizabeth Gaskell, or even Margaret Oliphant.  I think that's a shame, because the two books of hers that I have read are such engaging, compulsively readable books.  I posted about The Daisy Chain back in June of last year, though of the two, I much prefer The Heir of Redclyffe.

Just a warning, this review will contain spoilers.  I knew something of the plot, from reading an introduction to another book, but it didn't spoil the story for me.  However, you might prefer to discover this wonderful book on your own (in which case, you should avoid any back-cover summaries as well).

The heir of the title is Guy Morville.  Orphaned at birth, he has been raised by his grandfather, another Sir Guy, on the remote family estate at Redclyffe.  At his grandfather's death, he is brought to Hollywell House, the home of his new guardian Mr Edmonstone, whose wife is a distant Morville cousin.  There the new Sir Guy meets his cousins Charles (crippled with a diseased hip), Laura and Amabel, and school-girl Charlotte.  He also meets his cousin Philip Morville, a perfect pattern card of intelligence, education, and accomplishments.  Due to straightened family circumstances he has had to make a career in the army, rather than follow the life of a gentleman and scholar, to which he is so well suited.

Guy finds a warm welcome at Hollywell House, and a family life that he has never had before.  He is immediately drawn to make Mrs Edmonstone his confidant and surrogate mother.  But his relations with Philip are much less smooth.  There is a long-standing divide between their two branches of the family, dating back to a disputed inheritance.  While Guy's line held the estate and the riches, it was also cursed with violence and vice, and he fears that he has inherited the family curse.  Philip, on the other hand, confident in his superior mind and talents, and resenting his undeserved poverty, constantly instructs and corrects Guy, as he does his Edmonstone cousins.  As the last male of the second Morville line, Philip is the next heir of Redclyffe, and it occasionally occurs to him what a better heir he would make, with all the advantages wealth and position would give him.  For the first few chapters, I was in constant dread that Philip was going to be the hero of the book, and I found him completely insufferable, so annoying that I sometimes had to put the book down to remind myself that these were, after all, fictional characters.  Guy, Charlie, Amabel, and even Charlotte find him equally exasperating at times, but he is generally impervious to their attempts to puncture his self-esteem, and there is no one Philip recognizes as an equal, who could teach him to judge himself with much-needed honesty and humility.  I cannot think of a character who has irritated and exasperated me so much (for readers of Georgette Heyer, think of Venetia's Edward Yardley, but ten times more overbearing and interfering).

Philip is especially close to his cousin Laura, the eldest of the Edmonstone daughters.  His fear that she will be ensnared by Guy's title and position makes him realize his own feelings for her, and leads him to a declaration, which results in an understanding between the two (not an engagement, but both consider this binding).  Laura, completely under his spell, makes no objection when he insists they keep this secret from her parents.  I sighed with relief at this point, which the narrator points out as Philip's first step off the paths of righteousness.  Both he and Laura will pay heavily for this.

Guy, meanwhile, has gone up to Oxford, where he proves a diligent but not brilliant student.  More importantly to Yonge, he is a man of faith and charity, constantly struggling against temptations, particularly his dislike of Philip and a violent temper (the besetting sin of the Redclyffe Morvilles).  He spends his vacations with the Edmonstones, where he in turn falls in love with Amy, the second daughter.  Philip, who on very flimsy evidence believes Guy to be leading a life of secret vice, interferes to drive a wedge between Guy and Mr Edmonstone.  In the best Victorian style, Guy is forbidden to see Amy, until a chance encounter proves his innocence of at least some of Philip's charges.  Guy and Amy are then married forthwith, to Philip and Laura's despair.

On an extended and marvelously happy honeymoon in Europe, Guy and Amy meet Philip, a fellow tourist on leave from his regiment.  When they later learn that Philip has fallen victim to a fever and is lying ill and alone in a small Italian village, they do not hesitate to go to his assistance.  Guy spends himself nursing Philip back to health, and then catches the fever himself, which proves fatal in his case.  I don't mind admitting that Guy's death brought me to tears more than once, as it did Jo in Little Women (whom Meg finds crying over the book).  Amy, who is pregnant, is left a widow after four months of marriage.   If her child is a boy, he will be the new heir of Redclyffe.  Philip, who has undergone a complete repentance and conversion, sealed by Guy's self-sacrificial death, realizes with horror that if the child is a girl, he himself will inherit - a prospect that once seemed no more than his due.

Yonge carries the reader through this convoluted plot on the strength of her characters and her narrative voice.  In this she reminds me of Trollope.  I particularly enjoyed Charlie, a young man struggling with pain and disability, whose sharp mind and sharper tongue add welcome notes of acid (his attacks on Philip and his championship of Guy won my heart).  However, faith (not just religion) plays a much larger part in her story than in any other Victorian writer I have read.  Yonge was strongly influenced by the Oxford Movement, under the guidance of John Keble, one of its leading figures and the vicar of a neighboring parish.  Yonge quotes frequently from his popular and influential book of poems, The Christian Year.  The strong and practical faith of Guy and Amy is contrasted with the more intellectual and in the end weaker beliefs of Philip and Laura.

I enjoyed this book so much, and the characters and the story are still vivid in my mind.  I know this is one I will come back to again, and I will be looking for other books by Charlotte Yonge.

The Classics Challenge: January with Charlotte M. Yonge

I'm taking part in the Classics Challenge this year, hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn.  She will be posting questions of the 4th of each month, for us to answer about whichever classic we are reading at the time.  Fortunately, we have all month to post responses, since I was reading a book about the Civil War on January 4th (and even now, the book I'm reading isn't from the list I posted when I signed up for the challenge).  I am reading The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853.

This month's discussion focuses on the author, and because I'm not very far into the book, I'm answering the Level 1 questions (I had a lot of fun researching these):

Who is the author?  Charlotte M. Yonge

What does she look like?

(Source: Wikipedia)

When was she born? Where did she live?   She was born on August 11, 1823 and lived in Otterbourne, a village near Winchester in Hampshire.

What does her handwriting look like?



(Source: http://www.richardfordmanuscripts.co.uk/)

 What are some of the other novels she has written?   She wrote over a hundred books, as well as editing a magazine for many years!  She is best known today for The Heir of Redclyffe and The Daisy Chain.  But this title fascinates me: The Cunning Woman's Grandson: a Tale of Cheddar a Hundred Years Ago (published in 1889).

What is an interesting and random fact about her life?   The road that ran through her village of Otterbourne also ran through Chawton, past the "Jane Austen House."

A May family (but not mine)

The Daisy Chain, Charlotte M. Yonge

I first learned about Charlotte M. Yonge from the diaries of George Templeton Strong in the 1860s.  In one entry, he wrote of 

"that admirable Miss Charlotte Yonge . . . She can hardly touch any type of character not absolutely reprobate from the decorous Anglican proprieties which her books shew to be her atmosphere, without making it beautiful. I am ashamed of being so much gratified by this little kind voice from sordid old England."  (October 6, 1864)

I've been interested in Victorian women writers since discovering Margaret Oliphant and realizing how little I know about about 19th century women writing after Jane Austen.  When I looked on-line to see which of Yonge's books were available, I was surprised to see how many she had written, most of which are long out of print.  I found a used copy of The Daisy Chain, a title I at least recognized, but by the time it arrived it went straight to the TBR pile.

I picked it up again over the weekend and read it straight through.  When I finished it late last night, I had very mixed feelings about it.  Published in 1856, it is the story of the May family, living in the town of Market Stoneborough in Gloucestershire.  In the first chapter we are introduced to Dr. Richard May and his wife Margaret, and ten of their eleven children.  Mrs. May has recently given birth to the eleventh child and sixth daughter.  Only the oldest son, Richard, is absent, having failed an exam at Oxford that he is preparing to re-take.  On the same day that the story opens, tragedy strikes in the form of a carriage accident, which kills Mrs. May and leaves the oldest daughter, Margaret, with spinal injuries.

The first part of the book relates how the family deals with the devastating loss of their mother and copes with Margaret's care.  The story focuses on Richard and Margaret, as well as Flora, the second daughter, who takes over her sister's care; Norman, the second son, a brilliant student overset by the tragedy; and Ethel, the third daughter, who is plain, bookish, clumsy, impulsive but deeply loving and loyal.  Ethel is a very attractive character, despite her faults, which she struggles valiantly to overcome.  She reminded me of Jo March in Little Women, as the writing style in general reminded me of Louisa May Alcott.  Like Alcott and Anthony Trollope, Yonge makes her characters real people.  In fact, Alcott must have read Yonge, since Jo is crying over The Heir of Redclyffe when Meg brings the invitation to Mrs. Gardiner's dance. (Thanks to an improper review, I already know why Jo was crying, but I plan to read The Heir anyway.)  The bereaved father, Dr. May, also plays a major role, and he is a fascinating character.  Impulsive like his daughter Ethel, and equally warm-hearted, he had left the daily care and guidance of his growing family to his wife, while still of course maintaining his patriarchal authority.  Suddenly he has the charge of eleven children, ranging in age from six weeks to twenty-one years.  He makes many mistakes along the way, often acting hastily and out of temper, but he is always ready to admit his faults, and his children are confident in his love for them.

Again like Little Women, the second half of the book opens after several years have passed.  Margaret, who recovered enough to be able to walk almost unaided, has faded into an invalid.  Ethel, caring for her father and the children, devotes her extra time to her pet project, a school and church for a nearby village, Cocksmoor, which is a poverty-stricken waste. Others in the family have moved away from home, and their stories become much more eventful, and it's these stories that I found problematical (if anyone reading this is  worried about spoilers, you might want to skip the rest of the paragraph).  Against her father's wishes, Flora marries a dull but wealthy neighbor, pushes him into politics, and becomes a notable hostess.  She seems to be punished with the death of her first child and a complete breakdown, both mental and physical.  Norman, after a brilliant career at Oxford, suddenly decides he is called to be a missionary in New Zealand (which introduces an unfortunate note of racism in the discussion of the natives).  Silently in love for years with a neighboring heiress, he suddenly suggests that she join him in this work, in one of the most unconvincing proposals I have ever read.  And I was unreasonably aggravated by Margaret's fading away.  I know that medicine was not well advanced in the 1850s, but it seemed to me that something could have been done, or at least tried.  I kept thinking of Clara Sesemann in Heidi, and wondering what a course of mountain air and fresh goat's milk would do for her, but instead the family seems resigned to watching her die.

I will re-read the first part of this book with pleasure, especially in Ethel.  It will be interesting, if I do re-read the second part, to see if I feel as strongly about it.  I suppose I should remember it's just a story.

Just a final note that the book I have is a 1902 reprint.  Like my copy of The Shuttle, it has an inscription: "Norah Winifred Ryan with love from Mother  Oct 4 1905."  I hope Norah treasured it as a gift from her mother.