Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel

Nine previous monographs on Charlotte Mary Yonge and her works are listed in the bibliography of Gavin Budge's new study, all of which were written by women, but he is, I think, the first man to venture into the field. He should be welcomed with open arms, not because possession of Y chromosomes endows anybody with additional critical ability, but because it is very desirable that Yonge should be taken seriously by a wider section of those who study the nineteenth century. This book, though it addresses itself to a rather modest sample of Yonge's colossal output, is much more ambitious in its claims than any previous work has been, as well as very different in tone; it is good to see him citing Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on homosocial paranoia in connection with the relationship between Philip and Guy Morville.

In 2003 Budge published an article on The Heir of Redclyffe in Victorian Literature and Culture in which he emphasized the importance of typology to a proper understanding of the novel, and described the sophistication of the reading practices which prevailed in her circle (a topic on which Elisabeth Jay has also recently written). He has extensively rewritten the article here, and throughout the book argues that the critical reception of Yonge's works, and those of other Victorian novelists (such as Bulwer, about whom he has written elsewhere) has suffered because critics have presumed them to be incompetent realists, rather than conscious non-naturalists. It is an especially refreshing feature of his book that throughout he claims for Yonge the right to be treated as an author who knew what she was doing: a highly educated, highly professional writer who was self-conscious about her art and alert to the problems involved in fictionalizing reality. Those who imagine that her novels are simply exemplary, showing the good rewarded and the bad punished, can never have compared them with that large and excruciatingly boring class of Victorian fiction which really does aim no higher than that. What he calls the ‘active interpretative role’ (p. 46) forced on the readers of these panoramic novels with huge casts of characters, much dialogue and minimal authorial comment, is the process which educates such readers. Typology, symbolism, allusion, patterns which emerge and which make her, as he says ‘so unusually rewarding to reread’ (p. 87), render her fiction fit for painstaking exegesis, like that which she and her friends gave to the narrative poems of Southey and Scott, and like that which her mentor Keble gave to the sacramental landscape of The Christian Year. The interpretive process is not meant to be straightforward, nor the same for every reader; it will take place in a providential universe in which, if we wish it and work at it, we can find the truth, not because we are told it by the author, but from our own spiritual progress. This is what gives the novels their enjoyable even-handedness; in Yonge's work one can always feel what maddens the bad people about the good people as well as vice versa. The indirection of this approach was of course congenial to the Tractarian doctrine of Reserve, in which to state religious truths openly ran the danger of making them common and falsifiable. Budge explores the intellectual history of these ideas, drawing on Keble's lectures on poetry, Newman's sermons, the intuitionist philosophy of Thomas Reid and the Tractarian opposition to Mill's Logic. Not only does Budge give a very nuanced account of The Heir of Redclyffe in the light of this approach, but, more of a feat, he develops a wonderfully convincing reading of one of Yonge's trickiest and most perplexing books, Magnum Bonum (1879), whose plot hinges on a mysterious medical advance left as a legacy by a dying physician to his widow and young children. It has often been objected that concealing a major medical discovery until the boys qualify as doctors was not very public-spirited, but Budge shows that the function of the secret is really to discriminate between the characters, who all conceive it differently, and to test the reader. Medicine also figures in two later chapters about mesmerism and nervous irritability, in which he argues that Yonge's characters are conceived in terms of contemporary medical theories of the weaknesses and strengths of each gender.