Her abundant books helped to spread the influence of the Oxford Movement and showed her keen interest in matters of public health and sanitation.

[7] Her first commercial success, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), provided the funding to put the schooner Southern Cross into service on behalf of George Selwyn.

Other titles were Cameos from English History, Life of John Coleridge Patteson: Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands, and Hannah More.

[12] Yonge's personal example and influence on her goddaughter Alice Mary Coleridge were formative in her zeal for women's education, leading indirectly to the foundation of Abbots Bromley School for Girls.

Among her admirers were Lewis Carroll, George Eliot, William Ewart Gladstone, Charles Kingsley, Christina Rossetti, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Anthony Trollope.

[14] William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones read The Heir of Redclyffe aloud to each other while undergraduates at Oxford University and "took [the hero, Guy Morville's] medieval tastes and chivalric ideals as presiding elements in the formation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

"[15] Yonge's work was compared favourably with that of Trollope, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola.

[15] Sir John Arthur Ransome Marriott called her: ... not only a prolific novelist, but a serious student of history, especially in its personal aspects.

Having dealt in The Constable's Tower with Hubert de Burgh, with his famous defence of Dover Castle against Prince Louis of France (1213), and his still more famous victory at sea off Sandwich, and with Edward I as a crusader (The Prince and the Page), Miss Yonge drew on the Vie de Bertrand du Guesclin as well as on Froissart for her fascinating tale The Lances of Lynwood.

With characteristic modesty she expressed the hope that her sketch might "serve as an inducement to some young readers to make acquaintance with the delectable old Canon (Froissart) for themselves."

An officer in the Guards, asked in a game of "Confessions" what his prime object in life was, answered that it was to make himself like Guy Morville, hero of The Heir of Redclyffe.

[18] Abraham Kuyper, who read The Heir of Redclyffe on the recommendation of his fiancé, Johanna Schaay, found it a moving experience.

[21] Her novels such as The Daisy Chain, The Young Stepmother, The Trial, and The Three Brides encompass Victorian problems of urban pollution, sanitary reform, and epidemics of cholera and typhoid.