Dr Susan Walton
Dr Susan Walton is an Honorary Research Associate at the University of Hull in the Faculty of Arts, Education and Culture. Her research focuses on conservative women writers, scholars and missionaries of the long nineteenth century.
Degrees
MA, Medieval and Modern History, St Andrews University
PGCE, Institute of Education, London University
MA, Representations and Contexts, 1750-1830, University of York
PhD, English, University of Hull
My life and work
After a peripatetic childhood and schooling in America, Malaysia and, lastly, a small boarding school in Surrey, I went to St Andrews University to read History. Tutorials with Professor Norman Gash for my Special Subject during my final two years laid the foundations for my particular interest in the culture and politics of the 19th Century. With a PGCE from the Institute of Education, London University, I then began teaching at Haberdashers’ Aske’s Girls’ School, Hatcham.
On my marriage, I moved to Hull where my husband was a founding member of the recently established Drama Department. Over the next twenty years I combined the care of our three children with history-teaching appointments at a variety of levels: secondary schools, further education colleges and latterly in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Hull where I designed a course in Women’s History.
Then, at the turn of the century, I achieved a long-held ambition to return to university as a student. I enrolled at the University of York for an interdisciplinary MA taught by Jane Rendall, John Barrell and Harriet Guest. This enabled me to move sideways by combining history with literature and led on to my study for a PhD in the English Department at Hull under the supervision of Valerie Sanders. There my research centred on the works of Charlotte M. Yonge, an author unknown to me until Virago republished some of her novels in the 1980s. My dissertation became the basis for my monograph, Imagining Soldiers and Fathers in the Mid-Victorian Era: Charlotte Yonge’s Models of Manliness (Ashgate, 2010).
Research interests
My focus on Charlotte Yonge has been accidental and unexpected. Wanting to understand better the attitudes and anxieties of people experiencing the economic and social transformations of the nineteenth century by interrogating literary texts, I became engrossed by Yonge’s multiple writings both fictional and non-fictional. This has widened into an examination of her quiet significance as a member of the close circle of Tractarians and how she percolated their principles into unexpected sections of Victorian society.
Honorary Research Associate
My first academic article, ‘Charlotte M. Yonge and the “historic harem” of Edward Augustus Freeman’, in the Journal of Victorian Culture in 2006 was one of the three finalists for the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies Essay Prize. In 2007 Hull University awarded me the title of Honorary Research Associate. This has enabled me to continue with a variety of interdisciplinary research projects. Among these, was a commission in 2011 to write the extensive entry for Charlotte Yonge for the Oxford Bibliography Online and in 2016, in preparation for Hull’s City of Culture, to provide an entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for Rev. James Sibree, born in Hull but a missionary in Madagascar for over 50 years. I am very grateful to Hull University for the renewal of this honorary position every three years.