The Selected Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle: A Victorian and a Contemporary

(Paperback)

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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.

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.

Author Bio

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).