ABSTRACT
Novelist Charlotte Yonge is too invested in conservative religious and gender values to be enjoyable, or even readable, to a modern audience. This chapter focuses on the particular ambiguity of Yonge's depictions of marriage, which complicate her conservative reputation while seeming to participate in the celebration of traditional hierarchical gender roles. Yonge herself was never married and records of her life give no evidence that she ever contemplated marriage or formed any romantic attachments to men. Yonge explodes the fantasy of marriage to a richer man as guaranteed happiness and success, portraying the sixteen-year-old pregnant Violet in her first year of wifehood, driven to distraction and dangerous illness by her account books and responsibilities in her husband's household. Yonge most prominently shows the burden that marriage is, only suggesting the silver lining as the idea that the bigger the cross one bears, the closer one is to Christ and the more significant the blessing in the end.
