Charlotte Yonge, a best-seller admired by her greatest literary contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century, but ignored or vilified by critics for the next hundred years, has recently received some attention from biographers, from historians of the Oxford Movement and of children’s literature, and from feminist critics; but her literary art, as novelist, historian and critic, has not enjoyed much recognition. Alethea Hayter’s book appraises her as a writer, not simply as a symptom of her times, surveying her non-fictional studies in history, onomastics and wild-life as well as her family chronicles, historical novels and children’s books.
