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

Kathy Chamberlain taught English for over thirty years at the City University of New York. She has given lectures on Jane Welsh Carlyle at the CUNY Graduate Center and at conferences in the US and UK, and has published numerous essays about Virginia Woolf and Jane Welsh Carlyle.

“This compelling portrait of Jane Carlyle, the wife of the essayist Thomas Carlyle, illuminates the outwardly decorous but often inwardly tempestuous lives of Victorian women.”
- The New Yorker

“Chamberlain, Jane's latest and incomparably best biographer . . . gives us, at last, a Jane Carlyle who seems thrillingly alive.”
- Christian Science Monitor

“A delightful book about the early stirrings of feminism in Victorian England and a celebration of the lost art of letter writing.”
- Kirkus

“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.”
- The Spectator

“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 woman―everything that Jane was―in Kathy Chamberlain’s engagingly written biography. I had great pleasure reading it.”
- Deirdre Bair, biographer of Samuel Beckett (National Book Award), Simone de Beauvoir, Anais Nin, Carl Jung, and Saul Steinberg

“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.”
- Elizabeth Strout, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge

“Uncommonly insightful and luxuriantly atmospheric, Kathy Chamberlain’s portrait of Jane Welsh Carlyle―one of the most under-appreciated women of the Victorian era―brings a lost world back within the lucky reader’s grasp.”
- John Matteson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father

“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.”
- Daily Telegraph

“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

“I’ve read with pleasure and assent Kathy Chamberlain’s rescue of Jane Welsh Carlyle―such a terrific woman―from 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.”
- Lyndall Gordon, author of literary biographies of Charlotte Bronte, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, and T.S. Eliot