‘How differently it came upon her’: The Ageing Young Stepmother in Charlotte Yonge’s &lt;i&gt;The Young Step-Mother&lt;/i&gt; and Dinah Craik’s &lt;i&gt;Christian’s Mistake&lt;/i&gt;
Journal: 19 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Year: 2021

This article looks at two domestic novels of the 1860s, The Young Step-Mother by Charlotte Yonge and Christian’s Mistake by Dinah Craik, alongside Victorian vital statistics and family structure in order to argue that fictional stepmothers of the period — even very young stepmothers — are better understood as a portrayal of female middle age. One of the strongest conventions of the nineteenth-century novel is that its protagonist be young, especially if that protagonist is female. This youth con