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 Bronte 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.