Online, and at Weetwood Hall, Leeds, 24–25 May 2023
Co-organised by the Charlotte M. Yonge Fellowship and the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies
Online access to the conference’s two full days costs £30, and booking is open until 13 April 2023: https://store.leedstrinity.ac.uk/product-catalogue/conferences-events/conferences/victorian-transformations-conference-2023
The full programme is available here: https://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/research/research-centres/lcvs/victorian-transformations/
In Yonge’s bicentenary year, many of the papers address her life and context, including:
- discussions of The Clever Woman of the Family, The Heir of Redclyffe and Hopes and Fears.
- Yonge’s attitude to family and to women’s exploitation within it
- authorship, including CMY’s historical textbook output; and her fictional portrayals of women writers
- comparisons of Yonge with Hardy, and with Mary Ward (formerly one of CMY’s Goslings)
- attitudes to religion and missions in Yonge
There is also a roundtable on Yonge, with Clare Walker Gore, Clemence Schultze and Julia Courtney (co-editors of the new book Charlotte Mary Yonge: Writing the Victorian Age) plus the participation of several of the book’s contributors, in person or online. Contributors Tamara Wagner and Susan Walton are also delivering papers at the conference.
Professor Talia Schaffer (CUNY), who wrote the concluding chapter on Yonge’s reception in the 20th and 21st centuries, is one of the two keynote speakers; the other is Professor Helen Small (Oxford). Both keynote lectures address Yonge and her writings within the Victorian cultural and literary context.
NB: None of the CMY-related panels will clash with each other, so online participants will be able to watch them all. Other topics include Eliot, Gaskell, Oliphant, Stretton, Woolf, Stenbock, and women poets; Victorian artists; the press and technology; fashion and the body; colonial experience; queer studies; neo-Victorianism, and much more. See: https://www.leedstrinity.ac.uk/research/research-centres/lcvs/victorian-transformations/