Georgina Battiscombe

"... today even our s are presented at a Garden Court, followed by a more or less picnic on the lawn. All classes and ranks share in this taste ..."

"Lyra Innocentium was much valued by the devout, but it never attained to the world-wide popularity of , and in some quarters it gave positive offence. ... Kebles chief reason for publishing Lyra Innocentium was his desire to raise money for the rebuilding of Hursley Church."

"A picnic is the Englishmans grand gesture ..."

"Considerable difficulties, however, beset the way of s biographer. Her life was so much bound up with her husbands career that to write an orthodox biography would merely be to repeat the story which has already been told with such fullness and brilliance by and ."

"It was at , and then at , that Georginas literary career took wing. In 1943 her Charlotte Mary Yonge: the Story of an Uneventful Life was published. s reputation as a writer was then at its nadir, and Georginas book provoked a savage and contemptuous review by Mrs , but it was greeted with joy by a wide, though secret band of fans throughout the country, and led to a revival in Charlotte Yonge studies in university English literature departments, and to the foundation, a few years later, of the Charlotte Mary Yonge Society, an elite group of writers such as , and ."