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).

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.

• List of IllustrationsPreface and AcknowledgementsIntroductionChronologyEditorial NoteFurther ReadingPrelude: Youth, Courtship, Marriage, 1801–18281. ‘The Dreariest Spot in all the British Dominions’: 1828–18342. Arrival in Chelsea: 1834–18373. ‘The Lion’s Wife’: 1838–18424. ‘Alone, Alone in the World’: 1842–18435. The Onset of Lady Harriet: 1844–18476. The Widening Circle: 1848–18517. ‘The New-Modelling of our House’: 1852–18558. ‘More than One Place at a Time’: 1856–18599. The Rehabilitation of the Flesh: 1860–186210. The Accident in Cheapside: 1863–186411. ‘I Want so Much to Live’: 1865–1866Characters and CorrespondentsIndex