Charlotte Mary Yonge
Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist who wrote to the service of the church. Her books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement. Her abundant work is mostly out of print. Charlotte Mary Yonge was born in Otterbourne, Hampshire, E
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Charlotte Mary Yonge was an English novelist who wrote to the service of the church. Her books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement. Her abundant work is mostly out of print. Charlotte Mary Yonge was born in Otterbourne, Hampshire, England, on 11 August 1823 to William Yonge and Fanny Yonge, née Bargus. She was educated at home by her father, studying Latin, Greek, French, Euclid, and algebra. Her father's lessons could be harsh:
"He required diligence and accuracy that were utterly alien to me. He thundered at me so that nobody could bear to hear it and often reduced me to tears, but his approbation was so delightful that it was a delicious stimulus... I believe, in spite of all breezes over my innate slovenliness, it would have broken our hearts to leave off working together. And we went on till I was some years past twenty."
She began writing in 1848 and published during her long life about 160 works, chiefly novels. Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to enable the schooner Southern Cross to be put into service on behalf of George Selwyn. Similar charitable works were done with the profits from later novels. Yonge was also a founder and editor for forty years of The Monthly Packet, a magazine (founded in 1851) with a varied readership, but targeted at British Anglican girls (in later years it was addressed to a somewhat wider readership). Among the best known of her works are The Heir of Redclyffe, Heartsease, and The Daisy Chain. A Book of Golden Deeds is a collection of true stories of courage and self-sacrifice. She also wrote Cameos from English History, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, and Hannah More.
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