I recently read Charlotte Mary Yonge’s 1853 novel, The Heir of Redclyffe, which tells the story of the relationship between two principal characters, the youthful heir to the Redclyffe estate, Sir Guy Morville, and his rather impulsive and slightly older cousin, Captain Philip Morville, who stands to inherit the estate in the event of Guy’s death. It is not great literature. Yonge’s work has not stood the test of time and has been overshadowed by the likes of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Charles Dickens. Yet in her day, Yonge’s books were tremendously popular, bearing the marks of early Victorian romanticism and sentimental piety.
From a literary standpoint, we can see that Yonge writes as an all-knowing narrator, inhabiting the thoughts of the principal characters in quick succession, constantly shifting vantage points–sometimes within a single paragraph–thereby making the story difficult at times to follow. The book is overly long, although I can’t say how many pages it has. The copy I purchased from Amazon was obviously downloaded and printed from an online source without title page or page numbers! It starts slowly and takes too long to build to its denouement, although at that point it nearly becomes a page turner, only to be followed by the final chapters once more taking their time to wrap things up.
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