The Selected Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle:
A Victorian and A Contemporary
Richard Lansdown, editor
The author announces a publication that might be of interest to late-period Romanticists and early to mid-period Victorian scholars.
Jane Carlyle’s letters are among the crown jewels of English epistolary literature and give us wonderful insights into literary England from the 1830s to the 1860s, as well as providing a unique record of social change and the condition of women at the time. This is the first selection entirely drawn from the standard Duke/Edinburgh edition and largely presents the letters complete, as she wrote them.
Presents an image of Victorian life—especially women’s lives—that uniquely and surprisingly anticipates our own in the present.
- A modern, complete, and accessible selection of letters from an edition of nearly fifty volumes
- Respects the integrity of the materials; letters mostly printed complete, without ‘cherry-picking’
- Edited and annotated for a contemporary readership at both the scholarly and the general level
- Supported by an overall biographical and critical introduction, separate chapter introductions to form the life story, annotation as required, and an appendix listing correspondents and personalities
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.
Edinburgh University Press, hardback, £125, 978 1 3995 2346 2. (A paperback edition will follow in 2025.)
https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-the-selected-letters-of-jane-welsh-carlyle.html