Healing the wounds of war: (A)mending the national narrative in the historical publications of Charlotte M. Yonge

This article examines a little-known historical novel - Grisly Grisell (1893) - by a minor writer, Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901), arguing that Yonge here redefines the dominant national narrative by presenting an apparently 'feminised' history - focused on gradual cultural development and familiar, local and domestic in emphasis - which at once interrogates and complements the high political history of the court and war. Her articulation of this alternative historical perspective in her other later historical publications and within the context of the Tory Romantic historiographical tradition, a potentially patriarchal discourse which influenced and was influenced by both male and female writers, will demonstrate that the concept of a feminised narrative remains problematic, and the engendered character of the text may rest in the response of nineteenth-century readers. The article concludes by comparing Yonge's attempt to produce a complementary, a richer and, a more comprehensive version of the national past with J. R. Green's A Short History of the English People (1874), a work which demonstrates that feminised approaches to the national past were not confined to women writers (or, indeed, Tory Romantic historians).