Overview

This book is a modern edition of an Anglo-Scottish epistolary classic, drawn from the authoritative scholarly edition. The letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle are works of art in themselves but also shed light on the Victorian age and the experience of women within it. They are arranged chronologically alongside biographical summary, and include her correspondence concerning a large range of Victorian intellectuals and other identities, from Mazzini to Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Ruskin, and Tennyson to George Eliot. The letters are commonly regarded as among the liveliest in the language, alongside those of Byron, Keats, Henry James and Virginia Woolf, and are a key document in feminist history, and the history of female authorship.

Full Product Details

Author:   Jane Welsh Carlyle ,  Richard Lansdown (Adjunct Professor of English, University of Tasmania)
Publisher:   Edinburgh University Press
Imprint:   Edinburgh University Press
ISBN:  

9781399557207

ISBN 10:   1399557203
Pages:   472
Publication Date:   31 January 2026
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements Introduction Chronology Editorial Note Further Reading Prelude: Youth, Courtship, Marriage, 1801–1828 1. ‘The Dreariest Spot in all the British Dominions’: 1828–1834 2. Arrival in Chelsea: 1834–1837 3. ‘The Lion’s Wife’: 1838–1842 4. ‘Alone, Alone in the World’: 1842–1843 5. The Onset of Lady Harriet: 1844–1847 6. The Widening Circle: 1848–1851 7. ‘The New-Modelling of our House’: 1852–1855 8. ‘More than One Place at a Time’: 1856–1859 9. The Rehabilitation of the Flesh: 1860–1862 10. The Accident in Cheapside: 1863–1864 11. ‘I Want so Much to Live’: 1865–1866 Characters and Correspondents Index

Reviews

Wonderfully witty and absorbing, these letters are a compelling record of a remarkable life. The distinctive voice of Jane Welsh Carlyle was never subsumed into that of her celebrated husband Thomas, and this fine selection confirms her place among the most creative writers of the Victorian period. --Dinah Birch, University of Liverpool

Author Information

Richard Lansdown is Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Tasmania. He is the author of Literature and Truth: Imaginative Writing as a Medium for Ideas (Brill Rodopi, 2018), A New Scene of Thought: Studies in Romantic Realism (Brill Rodopi, 2016), The Cambridge Introduction to Byron (Cambridge University Press, 2012), The Autonomy of Literature (Macmillan, 2001), and Byron’s Historical Dramas (Oxford University Press, 1992), and the editor of 21st-Century Authors: John Ruskin (Oxford University Press, 2019), Byron’s Letters and Journals: A New Selection (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Strangers in the South Seas: The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006).

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