Charlotte M. Yonge

Charlotte Mary Yonge published some hundred and sixty books and was, in her lifetime, among the most widely read novelists in England. She lived her whole life in the same Hampshire village, taught in its Sunday school for decades, and turned over most of her earnings to church missions; the profits of The Heir of Redclyffe fitted out a missionary schooner. Her fiction is domestic in scale and unsparing in judgement: large families, small decisions, and the slow accumulation of character. The Heir of Redclyffe was a phenomenon among the Pre-Raphaelites, who read it as a manual of chivalry. She edited a girls' magazine for nearly forty years and used it to argue, quietly and persistently, that a woman's education was worth taking seriously.