The Essay: Stories to Keep Space for on the Bookshelves

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The Essay: Stories to Keep Space for on the Bookshelves: The Heir of Redclyffe

The Heir of Redclyffe

Stories to Keep Space for on the Bookshelves

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Stories to Keep Space for on the Bookshelves, The Heir of Redclyffe

Clare Walker-Gore revisits Charlotte M Yonge's best-selling novel from 1853.

A thrillingly romantic tale of family feuds, inherited curses, forbidden love and heroic self-sacrifice from a prolific author - Charlotte M Yonge - who was born 200 years ago.

Soldiers fighting in the Crimean War lapped up this story and it also influenced the young William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones who read it at Oxford.  The Heir of Redclyffe, published in 1853, reflects the mid-Victorian trend for medievalism and resurgence of High Church Anglicanism, combining gothic melodrama with sharply observed social realism, sprightly dialogue and wry humour. Although Charlotte M Yonge came to be associated mainly with domestic realism, in her long career  (1823–1901) she worked across a wide range of genres, writing biographies, histories, children's books, and novels from historical epics to long-running family sagas. In Yonge's bicentenary year, New Generation Thinker Clare Walker-Gore argues that now is the time to rediscover this brilliant and neglected woman writer.

Producer: Torquil MacLeod

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