Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World

February 6, 2017
Jane Carlyle's main claim to fame is her marriage to Thomas Carlyle, a philosopher and historian who became one of the towering figures of the Victorian era. Carlyle herself never published in her lifetime, but Chamberlain, emeritus professor at City University of New York, argues that her vivid writings--letters, an essay, sporadic journals, all published posthumously--give her claim to independent renown. Chamberlain focuses on a short period, 1843â1849, that Carlyle wrote about in detail. The book covers famous people that she knew, including Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Giuseppe Mazzini. It also discusses Jane's servants and contemporary reform movements to help low-income people, ensuring a multidimensional view of Victorian society. Chamberlain's narrative nonfiction technique, richly descriptive, often places the reader in a scene. Like Carlyle's letters, the book flits from topic to topic and reads like an entertaining novel, including a love triangle as Thomas becomes increasingly, albeit platonically, enraptured with Lady Harriet Baring. This humane, well-documented book provides a solid and readable lay introduction to a fascinating literary figure and her world.

February 15, 2017
A biography of Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-1866), the wife of essayist Thomas known for her "marvelous letters."A longtime professor at the City University of New York, Chamberlain has lectured and published numerous essays on Carlyle, widely regarded as one of England's great masters of the epistolary, a literary form of writing as much confessional as novelistic. Her letters--and her strong instructions to correspondents--insist that one must relate not only events, but also their effects. She believed that good letter writing involved a "splash of the mind," something like speaking. Encouraged by friends to pen a novel, she preferred her correspondence. Chamberlain traces her subject's lifelong quest to make a mark beyond the wifely duties of a Victorian wife. She worked tirelessly, through her many acquaintances, to help find work for unemployed women, and her husband's growing reputation as a writer brought all the brightest minds across their path: Dickens, Emerson, Thackeray, Margaret Fuller, Erasmus Darwin, and Giuseppe Mazzini, to name a few. One other acquaintance caused considerable trouble in their marriage: Lady Harriet Baring, with whom Thomas enjoyed a long, reportedly platonic relationship. Thomas, a patronizing, infantilizing husband, subjected Jane's jealousy to what the author terms "gaslighting." He was an influential Victorian literary figure but also a chauvinist who condemned abolitionists and derided blacks. Jane also found a place for German writer Amely Bolte as governess to a truly horrid child, whom the author points out would become a "three volume novel of a little charge," as well as the basis for Thackeray's cynical character in Vanity Fair Becky Sharp. Chamberlain's literary skills serve to showcase her expertise on a woman whom history has undeservedly ignored. A delightful book about the early stirrings of feminism in Victorian England and a celebration of the lost art of letter writing.

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March 1, 2017

Chamberlain's book is an exploration of Jane Welsh Carlyle's life in the Victorian age, with special emphasis on the period's ideas about gender and marriage. These ideas were very influential on Carlyle and play a prominent role in the first chapter, which devotes several pages to helping readers recognize her as a literary figure in her own right (Carlyle was married to essayist Thomas Carlyle), even if her audience would not be perceived as significant by today's standards. Chamberlain (formerly English, City Univ. of New York) largely succeeds in making her case, focusing on Carlyle's personal correspondence and reminding readers that letter writing was considered an art form in 19th-century England, with correspondences reaching far beyond their intended recipients as they were passed around among friends and family. She delves deeply into Thomas's affair with Harriet Taylor, the disruption it caused in Jane's life, and the ways in which the conventions of the age limited how she could respond and react to such disruption. VERDICT Recommended for readers with an interest in the Carlyles and Victorian life and literature in general.--Jenny Brewer, Helen Hall Lib., League City, TX

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2017
Chamberlain, like Shelley DeWees in Not Just Jane (2016), has taken another overlooked female out of the literary closet, dusting off and reexamining the voluminous correspondence of Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of the brilliant yet unabashedly self-absorbed and chauvinistic writer, Thomas Carlyle. Traveling in rarefied Victorian literary circles that included such luminaries as William Makepeace Thackeray, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell, Jane Welsh Carlyle wrote scores of often humorous, always enlightening epistles detailing, in dazzling prose, her fascinating experiences and observations. More than just a chronicler of events, she also immersed herself in social causes dear to her heart. A true reflection of the Victorian Age in all its contradictions, Carlyle was, at once, both a product of her times constrained by societal strictures and a beacon for future female essayists, as she found a socially acceptable way to wield considerable influence through her writings.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)