'Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Marriage and Friendship' by Kathy Chamberlain is reviewed by Lyndall Gordon
Kathy Chamberlain has set out to rescue Jane Carlyle from the frame of marriage. This fresh, admirably nuanced biography is not about the Victorian sage. It’s about a woman with a brilliant gift for communication, both orally and on paper, which, in her lifetime, bore little visible result. Carlyle published history and personal ruminations to great acclaim; his wife confined herself to private letters. She hoped to find a mission larger than her domestic existence in an age when nice women were quiet, and those, like the Brontë sisters, who risked utterance in the public arena had to conceal their identity under pseudonyms if they were to have a fair hearing. Jane’s tartly humorous letters delighted her correspondents with an undisguised self. As such, they are at once candid and guarded. Kathy Chamberlain underlines Jane’s modest hesitations about ‘I-ity’, for ‘I’ was not a pronoun so common to Victorian women...
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