Abstract
Like her more famous mentor Charlotte Yonge, Christabel Coleridge (1843–1921), granddaughter of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and author of more than forty books, spent much of her life thinking about girlhood and its travails. Occupying authorial and editorial positions that gave her some influence over the young, she also wrote in ways that illuminate the influences that she herself felt. In studying some representative works by Coleridge, one can discern this moderately successful upper-middle-class writer both acquiescing to and pushing back against powerful models of girlhood that she clearly did not always find naturally congenial. Coleridge approaches girlhood as a life stage marked by requirements of deference and dependence and potentially continuing for decades; while she credits her girl characters with intelligence, vitality, and competence, she is also aware of and often respectful of the social and familial forces that can work to frustrate the untrammelled exercise of these qualities. Because her ambivalence about the struggle between girls’ desire for autonomy and the larger community’s desire to contain these energies is the wellspring of her oeuvre, reading Coleridge’s now neglected works can contribute to our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian girlhood in Britain.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
This editorial collaboration lasted only two years; Yonge was superannuated from the magazine in 1893, after which time Coleridge held the editorship with the Packet’s male publisher until the periodical’s demise in 1899.
- 2.
Moruzi details pushback, starting as early as the 1860s, from Monthly Packet readers dissatisfied with what they considered Yonge’s overly circumscribed view of girlhood (38–40).
- 3.
Published by Frederick Warne in 1868 and credited on the title page only to “C.C.”, Giftie contains ninety-two pages of text and has a trim size of 3 × 4¾ inches.
- 4.
While Victorian fiction is full of female characters whose physical limitations are offset by their robust virtue, Giftie is not the only strong-willed heroine to yoke herself to a more delicate mate and to be morally improved thereby. For an interesting discussion of the latter trope, see Schaffer’s chapter “Disability Marriage” in her book Romance’s Rival.
- 5.
By putting “queer ambition” at “the heart of the tomboy tradition”, Shawna McDermott extends the tomboy label to fictional girls who do not participate in athletics, cut their hair, adopt a boyish nickname, and so on (135). By McDermott’s more expansive definition, Coleridge’s alienated female characters could be considered in this light.
- 6.
Virginia Woolf satirically describes this ideal in this famous passage: “She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it—in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others” (141).
- 7.
The essay forms the first chapter of A Woman’s Thoughts About Women.
- 8.
For some of the other responses to Crackanthorpe’s article, see Carolyn Christensen Nelson’s A New Woman Reader.
Works Cited
Abate, Michelle Ann. Tomboys: A Literary and Cultural History. Temple University Press, 2008.
Ahn, Somi. “The Old Woman and the New in Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Second Youth of Theodora Desanges.” Women’s Studies, vol. 49, no. 1, 2020, pp. 31–48.
Coleridge, Christabel R. Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters, Macmillan, 1903.
_____. The Daughters Who Have Not Revolted, Gardner, Darton & Co., [1894]. Gale Cengage Learning, Nineteenth Century Collections Online. Accessed 6 June 2021.
_____. Giftie the Changeling, Frederick Warne and Co., 1868.
_____. The Green Girls of Greythorpe. 1890. National Society’s Depository, n.d.
_____. The Girls of Flaxby, Walter Smith, 1882.
_____. Lady Betty, Frederick Warne and Co., 1869.
_____. Maud Florence Nellie, or Don’t Care! 1890. Project Gutenberg. 7 July 2013, accessed 6 June 2021. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43117/43117-h/43117-h.htm.
_____. The Tender Mercies of the Good. 1895. British Library Historical Print Editions, n.d.
_____. Three Little Wanderers. 1894. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, n.d.
Courtney, Julia. “The Barnacle: A Manuscript Magazine of the 1860s.” The Girl’s Own: Cultural Histories of the Anglo-American Girl, 1830–1915. Edited by Claudia Nelson and Lynne Vallone, University of Georgia Press, 1994, pp. 71–97.
Fox, Elizabeth. “Victorian Girls’ Periodicals and the Challenge of Adolescent Autonomy.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 48–69.
McDermott, Shawna. “The Tomboy Tradition: Taming Adolescent Ambition from 1869 to 2018.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 44, no. 2, 2019, pp. 134–155.
“Miss Christabel R. Coleridge.” The Churchman, 21 Nov. 1896, p. 679.
Moruzi, Kristine. Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915. Ashgate, 2012.
Nelson, Carolyn Christensen, ed. A New Woman Reader: Fiction, Articles, and Drama of the 1890s. Broadview, 2001.
Nelson, Claudia. “Coleridge, Christabel Rose.” The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Victorian Women’s Writing, edited by Lesa Scholl et al. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02721-6_278-1
Schaffer, Talia. “The Mysterious Magnum Bonum: Fighting to Read Charlotte Yonge.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 55, no. 2, 2000, pp. 244–275.
_____. Romance’s Rival: Familiar Marriage in Victorian Fiction. Oxford University Press, 2016.
Walton, Susan. “‘Spinning the webs’: Education and Distance Learning through Charlotte Yonge’s Monthly Packet.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 49, no. 2, 2016, pp. 278–304.
Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” 1931. Selected Essays. Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 140–45.
Yonge, Charlotte Mary. Womankind. Macmillan, 1877.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Nelson, C. (2024). Alienated Girlhood in Works by Christabel Coleridge. In: Moruzi, K., Smith, M.J. (eds) Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods. Literary Cultures and Childhoods. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38351-9_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38351-9_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-38350-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-38351-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)