02/06/2017 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, 1843–1849, 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. (Apr.)
A pleasantly idiosyncratic traversal of both the century’s and Jane’s forties [1843-1848] . . .Chamberlain eschews the flattened portrait of a 'self-sacrificing Jane Welsh who suffered from a tyrannical Thomas Carlyle'a portrait we have inherited, ironically, from Thomas himself . . .Chamberlain’s book provides the seeds for a corrective.
[An] unflaggingly vivid biography [and] a deeply textured evocation of mid-nineteenth century life . . . Jane lacked her own Boswell, but Kathy Chamberlain has made up for it.
Juliette Atkinson - Times Literary Supplement
There could not be a more enthusiastic or sympathetic champion of this not always easy woman, no whiff of hagiography spoils the venture . . . [Chamberlain] presents Jane Carlyle as if there is no barrier between her and us, allowing her to walk straight into our presence. . . . By its end,Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World has evoked its subject with something close to brilliance.”
Rosemary Goring - Scottish Review of Books
Reading Kathy Chamberlain’s fascinatingJane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian Worldis like savoring a Jane Austen novel. In her fresh and graceful prose, Chamberlain, like Austen, vividly describes the view from a window or an exchange at a Christmas party and illuminates the mysteries of a class and an era. Sex (and lack thereof), jealousy, madness, even revolutions: the book is packed with drama, but also arresting domestic details and insights into women and writing. Chamberlain is a master at creating characters. As well as Jane and Thomas Carlyle, dozens of other Victorians, familiar and unknown, leap off the page.This is simply the finest and most original biography I have read in years .”
Chamberlain plunges us into the world ofJaneand Thomas with dizzying effect. We meet extraordinary characters along the way . . . A judicious and thoughtful biography.
Kathy Chamberlain’s portrait of the celebrated letter writer and Victorian wife Jane Welsh Carlyle reveals a delightful and vibrant woman who is deeply engaged in her times despite the severe and sometimes comical restraints which that notorious era imposed on middle class women.A valuable rescue operation, full of charm and irony .”
[A] fascinating, meticulously researched study of Jane Welsh Carlyle . . .More than a biography,Jane Welsh Carlyle is an absorbing depiction of Victorian society in transition.”
Washington Independent Review of Books
Superb.
I’ve read with pleasure and assent Kathy Chamberlain’s rescue of Jane Welsh Carlylesuch a terrific womanfrom the marriage frame. Chamberlain conveys what she justly calls Jane Carlyle’s art of spontaneity: the Carlyle idea of letter-writing as “a splash of the mind” or “the transcript of the mind in the moment.” My favourite is her emphasis on the inner life, attending to things hinted at, mentioned fleetingly, or even carefully avoided – all those signs we biographers must indeed read if we are to reach the live person.”
Kathy Chamberlain has written an intelligent, witty, thoroughly engaging biography of Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of Thomas Carlyle, one of the most significant men of letters in 19th-century England. While frequently considered an adjunct to or a victim of her literary giant of a husband, Jane emerges in these pages as a fascinating person in her own right . . .Chamberlain’s sensitivity, wit and deep knowledge of the period are beautifully suited to her subject, making this the most fascinating biography I have read in years.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune
A rich and absorbing study . . . [Chamberlain is] persuasively sympathetic to her subject’s difficulties and so infectiously alert to her talents . . . Everything connects in Chamberlain’s ingenious curation of people and themes.
Uncommonly insightful and luxuriantly atmospheric , Kathy Chamberlain’s portrait of Jane Welsh Carlyleone of the most under-appreciated women of the Victorian erabrings a lost world back within the lucky reader’s grasp.”
A really wonderful piece of work – Compelling, readable, and utterly distinct in its approach , this biographical narrative of Jane Carlyle sparkles with the wit and intelligence of the subject herself. Chamberlain has made a brilliant choice in choosing to focus on only a few years of Jane Carlyle’s life, displaying the woman in depth through her friendships, domestic arrangements, and most importantly, through the vitality of the letters she wrote.If you think, as I originally did, that you have no particular interest in the life of Jane Carlyle, read this – You will be captivated by the life of a woman who is given a new chance through Chamberlain’s work, to express herself passionately and sagely, to engage us in her world, where we will recognize our own.”
Adjectives have long abounded to slot Jane Welsh Carlyle firmly into the role of worthy adjunct (and occasional adversary) of her husband, Thomas.We are fortunate that now we can meet this witty, highly intelligent, sprightly, and politically aware womaneverything that Jane wasin Kathy Chamberlain’s engagingly written biography. I had great pleasure reading it.”
Hugely satisfying . . . such a happy read . . . You have to buy the book, which you’ll then read aloud, pass around, and quote from. Jane Carlyle is back with a vengeance.
Chamberlain, Jane's latest and incomparably best biographer . . . gives us, at last, a Jane Carlyle who seems thrillingly alive.
Christian Science Monitor
This compelling portrait ofJaneCarlyle, the wife of the essayist ThomasCarlyle, illuminates the outwardly decorous but often inwardly tempestuous lives of Victorian women.
03/01/2017 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
2017-02-02 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 Bölte 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.