ISBN: 014016149X
Godina izdanja: 1986
Jezik: Engleski
Autor: Strani

Charlotte Mary Yonge - The Clever Woman of the Family
Penguin, 1986
372 str.
meki povez
stanje: vrlo dobro

Virago modern classics

Charlotte Mary Yonge was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Though perhaps best known for her popular children’s books, she also wrote adult novels. Swiftly-plotted and cleanly-wrought, Yonge’s work has again gained critical attention, in part because she writes about the predicament of nineteenth-century women.

The Clever Woman of the Family is a new woman novel that focuses on a group of women in a small seaside community. It is the early 1860s and British women outnumber men to such an extent that not all women can expect to marry. Rachel Curtis, the clever woman of the title, is an opinionated young woman whose yearning for a “mission” in life leads to tragicomic results. The Broadview edition contextualizes the novel’s ambivalent feminism and pro-empire sentiments with materials on some of the most pertinent debates of the time.

Rose found the wheeled chair, to which her aunt gave the preference, was engaged, and shaking her little discreet head at `the shakey chair` and `the stuffy chair,` she turned pensively homeward, and was speeding down Mackarel Lane, when she was stayed by the words, `My little girl!` and the grandest and most bearded gentleman she had ever seen, demanded, `Can you tell me if Miss Williams lives here?`

`...it was not so dreadful as people would have one believe, it was no such wrench as novels described to make up one`s mind to prefer a systematically useful life to an agreeable man`
At the age of twenty-five Rachel Curtis, daughter of the squire of the Homestead, considers herself `the clever woman of the family`. Rejecting the idea of marriage, she seeks, instead, a mission in life. An avid reader of popular tracts, Rachel`s dream is to mould young minds with her high educational ideals. But her theories are not tempered by experience, and in a long and painful lesson she comes to learn that her true mission is not the one she had imagined. First published in 1865, this is a compelling novel by Charlotte Yonge, one of the greatest story-tellers of her age. Upholding the traditions of Victorian England, it gives a fascinating insight into the ways in which middle-class women were denied personal ambition and taught that devotion and self-sacrifice were the highest virtues to which a woman should aspire.
Charlotte M. Yonge (1823-1901) lived at Otterbourne, near Winchester, throughout her life. She became a leading apologist of the Oxford Movement, the High Church faction of the Anglican Church. A prolific writer, her work was always read, and vetted, by her father, and later her `pope` John Keble. Charlotte Yonge produced over 160 titles, including The Heir of Redclyffe and The Daisy Chain, and money she earned was donated to good causes. She influenced the Pre-Raphaelites, and in her day, was even more popular than Dickens and Thackeray.

The cover shows `Portrait of Lady Markham` by Edward John Poynter.


Fiction, Classics, 014016149X