Written when the author was in her early twenties, and now regarded as Yonge's first serious work of fiction, Abbeychurch grapples with both serious theological issues pertaining to the schism between Broad, High and Low factions in the Church of England, as well as with the struggles of ego and impulse that are common in adolescence and early adulthood. A gripping and sophisticated example of women's nineteenth-century fiction.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

Charlotte Mary Yonge's books provide an intimate picture of English aristocracy in the turn of the 20th century. There is a slight similarity to Jane Austin's novels due to both authoresses writing about the same level of society during the same period. An upper class families' many children are scattered to friends and relatives because the mother has gone to care for the father who is a highranking officer in the British army in India. The children, from teenagers to tots, are trying to adapt to their new households.

After that we got into a bewilderment. We knew nothing of the future question of temperance versus total abstinence; but after it had been extracted that Miss Newton regarded cards as the devil's books, the inconsistent little sister changed sides, and declared it narrow and evangelical to renounce what was innocent. Clarence argued that what might be harmless for others might be dangerous for such as himself, and that his real difficulty in making even a mental vow was that, if broken, there was an additional sin

Kate is an orphan who suddenly gets promoted to Countess. She gets moved to her old spinster aunts' house and commences to struggle for 7/8 of the book. She's heedless and apt to get in scrapes. The story is a fair telling, and neither Kate's Aunt Barbara nor Kate herself end up looking very good by the end of things.

The novel opens in the year 1421. England, though engaged in warfare in France, enjoys peace and prosperity at home, but Scotland is in a state of anarchy. Its king, James I, the caged lion of the title, has been a prisoner in England since boyhood, though the king, Henry V, treats him as a friend. The chief character, Malcolm Stewart, is a timid, sickly, scholarly youth, who feels that the best way to protect his tenants and his sister is to give her in marriage to their soldierly cousin Patrick, and himself become a monk. This is found to be no solution. Lilias is placed in a nunnery,...

Christina Sorel, the saintly heroine of this mostly uneventful and underwhelming historical novel set in the rocky reaches of Austria in the 15th century, is abandoned as a baby by her mercenary father to be brought up by his carpenter brother. When the father suddenly returns she is sixteen and finally of use to him, so he takes her with him to attend a sick maiden and gain favor with his master, the robber baron Freiherr von Adlerstein.