Quick Facts
Biography
Christabel Rose Coleridge (25 May 1843 – 14 November 1921) was an English novelist who also edited girls' magazines, sometimes in collaboration with the writer Charlotte Yonge. Her views on the role of women in society were conservative.
Early life
A grand-daughter of the 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 was a children's historical story called Lady Betty (1869). Minstrel Dick (1896) is set mainly in the 14th-century Berkhamstead court of the dying Edward, the Black Prince. Her fiction expressed her concern with morality, and several of her books were published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
She was a friend of Charlotte Yonge's, distantly related to her through Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, who, like Christabel, had been one of Yonge's informal society known as the Goslings. They collaborated on several writing projects, such as The Miz Maze or The Winkworth Puzzle: 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).
Another friend was the writer Frances Mary Peard (1835–1922), who published more than 40 books between 1867 and 1909, mostly domestic novels and short-story volumes.
In 1880, Christabel moved to Torquay, when her father retired there. Christabel had conservative ideas about the role of women in society, and she published a collection of essays on the subject: The Daughters Who Have not Revolted (1894). Her last novel, Miss Lucy. A character study, was published in 1908.