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I had heard about this book - it is referenced in other nineteenth century novels I've read (including *Little Women*). And I see why! It’s a really enjoyable read. Its like a soap opera. At the end I wanted more.
Spoilers for a text produced more than 150 years ago...
I wanted to know if Charlie made a life despite his lameness? Did Philip and Laura patch up their relationship? What happened with the next generation?
I believe it was one of the first great domestic novels, focussing on the internal life and domestic concerns of everyday people.
Also, it was insanely popular. From the first The Heir of Redclyffe was a tremendous financial success, enabling Yonge to give the Bishop of New Zealand a sum of money to be spent on building a missionary ship, the Southern Cross.
Yonge's work was widely read and respected in the nineteenth century. Among her admirers were Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, William Ewart Gladstone, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Anthony Trollope. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones read *The Heir of Redclyffe* aloud to each other while undergraduates at Oxford University and "took [the hero, Guy Morville's] medieval tastes and chivalric ideals as presiding elements in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Yonge's work was compared favourably with that of Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Trollope, and Emile Zola.
Wiki says that her works were so popular that a midshipman was able to supply from memory a missing page in his ship's copy of *The Daisy Chain*. An officer in the Guards, asked in a game of "Confessions" what his prime object in life was, answered that it was to make himself like Guy Morville, hero of *The Heir of Redclyffe*.
The author's brother Julian reported that nearly all the young men in his regiment had a copy. The teenaged George Saintsbury included Guy Morville in a list of "Things and Persons to be Adored". Henry James wrote disparagingly of the "semi-developed novels" read by women and their children, although "Occasionally, like the Heir of Redclyffe, they almost legitimate themselves by the force of genius. But this only when a first-rate mind takes the matter in hand." (Ooooh, the backhanded compliment, Henry!)
Its popularity was not always admired. Oscar Wilde, while touring America in 1883, spoke with a condemned criminal in a Nebraska jail who said he was reading Charlotte Yonge. Wilde commented a little later, "My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man, but if he reads *The Heir of Redclyffe* it's perhaps as well to let the law take its course."
It has not weathered well, possibly because of the ardent Christian message (which you can see in the fact that she spent some of the proceeds on a missionary ship!) Yonge is sometimes referred to as "the novelist of the Oxford Movement", as her novels frequently reflect the values and concerns of Anglo-Catholicism. She remained in the same village all her life and, despite writing 160 works, was a teacher in the village Sunday school for 71 years.
Spoilers for a text produced more than 150 years ago...
I wanted to know if Charlie made a life despite his lameness? Did Philip and Laura patch up their relationship? What happened with the next generation?
I believe it was one of the first great domestic novels, focussing on the internal life and domestic concerns of everyday people.
Also, it was insanely popular. From the first The Heir of Redclyffe was a tremendous financial success, enabling Yonge to give the Bishop of New Zealand a sum of money to be spent on building a missionary ship, the Southern Cross.
Yonge's work was widely read and respected in the nineteenth century. Among her admirers were Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, William Ewart Gladstone, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Anthony Trollope. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones read *The Heir of Redclyffe* aloud to each other while undergraduates at Oxford University and "took [the hero, Guy Morville's] medieval tastes and chivalric ideals as presiding elements in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood." Yonge's work was compared favourably with that of Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, Trollope, and Emile Zola.
Wiki says that her works were so popular that a midshipman was able to supply from memory a missing page in his ship's copy of *The Daisy Chain*. An officer in the Guards, asked in a game of "Confessions" what his prime object in life was, answered that it was to make himself like Guy Morville, hero of *The Heir of Redclyffe*.
The author's brother Julian reported that nearly all the young men in his regiment had a copy. The teenaged George Saintsbury included Guy Morville in a list of "Things and Persons to be Adored". Henry James wrote disparagingly of the "semi-developed novels" read by women and their children, although "Occasionally, like the Heir of Redclyffe, they almost legitimate themselves by the force of genius. But this only when a first-rate mind takes the matter in hand." (Ooooh, the backhanded compliment, Henry!)
Its popularity was not always admired. Oscar Wilde, while touring America in 1883, spoke with a condemned criminal in a Nebraska jail who said he was reading Charlotte Yonge. Wilde commented a little later, "My heart was turned by the eyes of the doomed man, but if he reads *The Heir of Redclyffe* it's perhaps as well to let the law take its course."
It has not weathered well, possibly because of the ardent Christian message (which you can see in the fact that she spent some of the proceeds on a missionary ship!) Yonge is sometimes referred to as "the novelist of the Oxford Movement", as her novels frequently reflect the values and concerns of Anglo-Catholicism. She remained in the same village all her life and, despite writing 160 works, was a teacher in the village Sunday school for 71 years.
