Its religious tone is derived from the High Church background of her family and from her friendship with a leading figure in the Oxford Movement, John Keble, who closely supervised the writing of the book.

From the first The Heir of Redclyffe was a tremendous financial success, enabling Yonge to give the Bishop of New Zealand a sum of money to be spent on building a missionary ship, the Southern Cross.

William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, when students at Oxford, read the book aloud and decided to adopt the chivalric ideals of Guy Morville as part of the principles of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

[5] Count Tolstoy must have read The Heir of Redclyffe if the critic John Sutherland is correct in detecting its influence on Anna Karenina.

[6] Henry James wrote disparagingly of the "semi-developed novels" read by women and their children, although "Occasionally, like the Heir of Redclyffe, they almost legitimate themselves by the force of genius.

"[8] Oscar Wilde, while touring America in 1882, spoke with a condemned criminal in a Nebraska jail who said he was reading Charlotte Yonge.