Abstract
Chapter 5: “Home by Michaelmas: Yonge’s Tractarian Domestic” returns to the time of the Papal Aggression crisis, showing how some of Charlotte Yonge’s mid-century novels replace marriage with service to the church and affiliation to a redefined family as the culmination of a character arc. The vision of celibacy Yonge offers, however, is not so much a rejection of English domesticity as a reorienting of it: most of her unmarried protagonists, unlike Newman’s, do not need to leave either England or their homes in order to be active agents of change in the community. Instead, Yonge redefines both Anglican identity and the domestic sphere. At the same time, Yonge’s embrace of Anglican Catholicity is also the means of affiliating with the universal church.
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- 1.
When dating the books, it is important to note The Heir of Redclyffe and Part One of The Daisy Chain were circulated serially in 1851 before being published in volume form.
- 2.
I explore the missionary dynamic of Yonge’s fiction at greater length in my article on The Daisy Chain: “The Ship That Bears Through the Waves.”
- 3.
Gavin Budge points out that the way religious outreach relates to domestic daily chores is sometimes overlooked in readings of The Daisy Chain that see it only as endorsing domesticity at the expense of women’s education (236).
- 4.
For a more thorough analysis of the convent inspection bill and anti-Catholic legislation in general, see Walter Arnstein’s Protestant versus Catholic in Mid-Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns.
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Traver, T.H. (2019). “Home by Michaelmas”: Yonge’s Tractarian Domestic. In: Victorian Cosmopolitanism and English Catholicity in the Mid-Century Novel . Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31347-0_5
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