page_title: Jane Welsh Carlyle
section_title: Marriage to Thomas Carlyle
hierarchical_section_title: Jane Welsh Carlyle / Life / Marriage to Thomas Carlyle
context_page_description: Jane Welsh Carlyle was a Scottish writer. She did not publish any work in her lifetime, but she was widely seen as an extraordinary letter writer. Virginia Woolf called her one of the "great letter writers," and Elizabeth Hardwick described her work as a "private writing career."
context_section_description: Jane's tutor Edward Irving had introduced her to Carlyle, with whom she came to have a mutual romantic (although not sexually intimate) attraction. The couple married in 1826 and for the first six years lived on a farm in Scotland; the marriage was often unhappy. Thomas was always busy writing and Jane remained dutiful in doing the housework. After the couple moved from Scotland to London in 1834, Jane took on the added job of keeping the neighborhood quiet so that her husband could write undisturbed. Phyllis Rose wrote "the quintessential expression of Jane's role within the marriage was her continuing battle to protect her husband from the crowing of cocks."
   In an 1844 letter to her husband, Jane wrote about this arrangement.  "I slept much better last night, in spite of cocks of every variety of power, a dog, and a considerable rumblement of carts. But the evil of these things is not doubled or tripled for me by the reflection that you were being kept awake by them."
  Their voluminous correspondence has been published, and the letters show that the couple's affection for each other was marred by frequent quarrels. Samuel Butler once wrote: "It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four". Carlyle's biographer James Anthony Froude posthumously published his opinion that the marriage remained unconsummated.
  Historian Paul Johnson notes in Creators that she not only irked her husband but made prickly comments about others, such as fellow female writer George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), of whom she said: "She looks Propriety personified. Oh, so slow!"
  Their long marriage was complicated by other relationships on both sides, though these appear to have been platonic.  The Carlyle marriage itself was believed to have been platonic by some of their contemporaries. 
  Jane was jealous of a friendship her husband had with the socialite and hostess Lady Harriet Mary Montagu (later Lady Ashburton). The friendship was non-sexual yet they still spent a lot of time together. Jane expressed her jealousy and anger in a letter dated in 1856.
caption: Craigenputtock House 1829
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