Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World: A Story of Love, Work, Friendship, and Marriage

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.