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.