For an era in which belief in Progress (with a capital P) was tantamount to religion, the Victorian age was rather a step backward for women.

Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women," published in 1792, had by the mid-19th century become all but forgotten; the 18th-century tolerance (albeit halfhearted) of Bluestockings (a society of educated, intellectual women) had been supplanted by an ideology of the Angel in the House.

Women were expected to rule over the domestic sphere, seeing to the furnishings, meals and amenities, largely through overseeing the servants, who, due to economic conditions, were available in abundance, inexpensive enough to hire that the typical middle-class woman no longer needed to do the housekeeping and child rearing.

For the middle class, aping the upper, the "trend was toward wives of leisure, who came to seem like ornaments for display, enhancing the status of their husbands."

The Victorian age was, in other words, a particularly fraught time for a woman of spirit, talent and intellect who wanted to be useful but also valued tradition and respectability. When the woman was the wife of a lionized writer — a Victorian Sage — matters became yet more complicated.

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, "very much a Victorian and of her era" but "at the same time moving toward the future."

“Jane Welsh Carlyle and Her Victorian World.” by Kathy Chamberlain

By focusing on only a few highly significant years in Jane's life, Chamberlain develops a portrait quite astounding in breadth — it's as fine a depiction of England in the 1840s as I have encountered — and depth. Drawing on Jane's private correspondence, diary entries and notebooks, Chamberlain brings to life the domestic details, passionate friendships, jealousies, insecurities, fears and triumphs of a most remarkable woman, one who knew, and wrote about, everyone — German governesses and aristocrats, her own often inebriated maid, captains of industry and virtually the entire pantheon of authors and intellectuals of the age: Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Erasmus Darwin, Margaret Fuller and the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini.

While Jane met most of them through or because of her husband, they sought her out in her own right, frequently preferring her perception, irony and conversation to his windy orations and rants. Reading excerpts from Jane's letters, which Chamberlain rightly views as a significant literary achievement, it is easy to see why she was such a valued friend and companion, a complicated woman whose struggles will trigger a flash of recognition even today.

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.

Patricia L. Hagen teaches English at the College of St. Scholastica in Duluth.

Jane Welsh Carlyle and her Victorian World
By: Kathy Chamberlain.
Publisher: Overlook Press, 398 pages, $37.50.