Alienated Girlhood in Works by Christabel Coleridge

Like her more famous mentor Charlotte Yonge, Christabel Coleridge (1843–1921), granddaughter of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and author of more than forty books, spent much of her life thinking about girlhood and its travails. Occupying authorial and editorial positions that gave her some influence over the young, she also wrote in ways that illuminate the influences that she herself felt. In studying some representative works by Coleridge, one can discern this moderately successful upper-middle-class writer both acquiescing to and pushing back against powerful models of girlhood that she clearly did not always find naturally congenial. Coleridge approaches girlhood as a life stage marked by requirements of deference and dependence and potentially continuing for decades; while she credits her girl characters with intelligence, vitality, and competence, she is also aware of and often respectful of the social and familial forces that can work to frustrate the untrammelled exercise of these qualities. Because her ambivalence about the struggle between girls’ desire for autonomy and the larger community’s desire to contain these energies is the wellspring of her oeuvre, reading Coleridge’s now neglected works can contribute to our understanding of Victorian and Edwardian girlhood in Britain.