Froudes biography of the carlyles

[Disponible en español]

As Stefan Collini pointed out in a recent review of a biography of Leslie Stephens, the great Victorian intellectual who was also Virginia Woolf's father,

At the end of the nineteenth century, for a "man of letters" to ruminate upon the possibility of domestic tyranny was, inescapably, to ruminate on "the Carlyle scandal".

Shortly after Carlyle's death in 1881, his anointed biographer, J. A. Froude, published materials which brought the domestic suffering and unhappiness of Jane Welsh Carlyle into full public view. The history of the Carlyles' marriage raised in acute form the question of whether a writer was an inherently unsuitable marriage partner, at once too demanding, too self-absorbed and too much at home.

Froude certainly revealed Carlyle to have been "ill to live wi"' (and for this he was roundly denounced for having betrayed his master). But he did more: he alluded to, but ostentatiously refused to confirm or deny, rumours that the Carly