Rupert Christiansen

An enemy of stuff and nonsense

Just how unhappy was Jane Welsh’s 40-year marriage to Thomas Carlyle? For decades after the publication of J. A. Froude’s scandalously revealing biography in 1883, it was widely regarded as one of the dirtier secrets of Victorian literary history. She never wanted him in the first place, he was sexually impotent, she was bitterly jealous of his friendship with Lady Harriet Ashburton, he was either morosely taciturn or explosively violent.

This new collection of Jane’s letters — a one-volume offshoot of the gigantic and still incomplete Duke edition — follows a revisionist line and paints a more ambiguous picture. Jane’s warmer feelings towards Lady Harriet are presented, and her possibly lesbian inclinations explored (to no plausible end). Recently unearthed documents suggest that the years in the wilds of Craigenputtock weren’t altogether the nightmare so melodramatically portrayed by Froude. One senses a woman who could give as good as she got, and a man who shared his wife’s temperament, if not her sensibility. The Carlyles’ life together may have been stormy, but it wasn’t rocky.

Jane was frequently exasperated by her husband, but she was never bored by him. and she remained unusually free to take advantage of the opportunities that his neglect of her afforded. In the early years, she may have worried that Carlyle’s genius and fame would ‘annihilate my I-ity’, as she memorably put it in a letter to John Sterling. But this didn’t happen — the letters record a quite astonishingly vigorous persistence of her ‘I-ity’ — and, as the editors suggest here, her failure to become a novelist (as some commentators, impressed by the vividness of her epistolary prose, have lamented) is better explained by the fact that she was fundamentally ‘a private writer, acutely aware of her immediate audience’ than by speculations about Carlyle’s envious repression of her creativity.

A bookish only child reared in genteel Border country, the young Jane Welsh grew up with a great fear of ending up mired in provincial mediocrity.

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