Christabel Rose Coleridge

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Christabel Rose Coleridge (25 May 1843, London - 14 November 1921, Torquay) was an English novelist who also edited girls' magazines, sometimes in collaboration with the writer Charlotte Yonge.

A granddaughter of the famous poet, Samuel Coleridge, Christabel was born at St Mark's College, Chelsea while her father Derwent was headmaster there. For a time she helped her brother Ernest run a school, but her ambition was to be a writer. She went on to publish more than 15 novels, the first being a children's historical story called Lady Betty (1869). Her fiction expressed her concern with morality, and several books were published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

She was a friend of Charlotte Yonge, distantly related to her through Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, who, like Christabel, had been one of Yonge's protégées or "goslings". They collaborated on several writing projects like The Miz Maze: a story in letters by nine authors (1883). Christabel Coleridge co-edited the Monthly Packet with her "Mother Goose" in the early 1890s, and then became sole editor of this Anglican magazine for middle-class girls. She also edited a magazine intended for the working-class members of the church-based Girls' Friendly Society. After Yonge's death she published the biographical Charlotte Mary Yonge: her Life and Letters (1903).

In 1880 she moved to Torquay when her father retired there. Christabel Coleridge had conservative ideas about women's role in society and she published a collection of essays on this topic in 1894: The Daughters who have not Revolted. Her last novel, Miss Lucy, was published in 1908.

[edit] References

Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction 1900-14: New Voices in the Age of Uncertainty, ed.Kemp, Mitchell, Trotter (OUP 1997)
Cherry Durrant, Derwent Coleridge in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)