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15 - Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Private Writing Career

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2020

Douglas Gifford
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
Dorothy McMillan
Affiliation:
University of Glasgow
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Summary

Jane Welsh Carlyle (1801-66) published nothing in her lifetime. She left no unpublished novels, short stories or essays to be discovered and published after her death. Why, therefore, should she be considered in a volume on the writing of Scottish women? The reason is that she was an incomparable writer of letters of which more than 3,000 have survived. Her private writing career, for all its apparent spontaneous unintended nature, has been considerable. However private this mode of literary output, as part of the genre of life-writing, it is now as open to critical approaches as any other genre.

After her death Thomas Carlyle collected her surviving letters, providing explanatory notes to many. In response to reading them he wrote, 8 July 1866:

The whole of yesterday I spent in reading and arranging the letters of 1857; such a day's reading as I perhaps never had in my life before. What a piercing radiancy of meaning to me in those dear records … Constantly there is such an electric shower of all-illuminating brilliancy, penetration, recognition, wise discernment, just enthusiasm, humour, grace, patience, courage, love, - and in fine of spontaneous nobleness of mind and intellect, - as I know not where to parallel!

The tone of this passage is representative of that sustained by Carlyle throughout his Reminiscences of Welsh Carlyle: grief-stricken and guilt-stricken in equal measure, exaggerated and hyperbolic in its estimation of her character and talents. He continued with an estimation of her writing talents which was to become the basis of claims that Welsh Carlyle should or might have been a novelist if only she had not married Thomas Carlyle:

As to ‘talent’, epistolary and other, these Letters … equal and surpass whatever of best I know to exist in that kind; for ‘talent’, ‘genius’, or whatever we may call it, what an evidence, if my little woman needed that to me! Not all the Sands and Elliots and babbling cohue [mob] of ‘celebrated scribbling women’ that have strutted over the world, in my time, could … , if all boiled down and distilled to essence, make one such woman.

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Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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