In the nineteenth century the English woman writer came into her own, professionally speaking, chiefly via the novel. Works like Jane Eyre and Adam Bede earned their authors serious popularity, and it came as no surprise, then, that Charlotte Brontë’s friend Elizabeth Gaskell published her biography in 1857, or that George Eliot’s husband John Walter Cross published hers in 1885. (In 1869 the novelist’s nephew James Edward Austen Leigh issued his Memoir of Jane Austen in a more circumscribed and guarded spirit.) The appearance in 1883 of the Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, edited by her husband Thomas and his friend and literary executor James Anthony Froude, was unexpected by comparison. Jane Welsh Carlyle—and she insisted on the retention of her maiden name, just as the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning did; the practice among married women (especially in Scotland) is not a modern invention—had published not a word in her lifetime (1801–1866) and was known to the Victorian reading public, if at all, only as the wife of the fuliginous intellectual and gadfly Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881): author of Sartor Resartus, The French Revolution, Past and Present and other works of historical biography and social critique. Nor were Jane’s letters the reasonably anodyne ones written by Austen and Eliot. They were vivid by the standards of conventional Victorian femininity, and they painted an often lonely picture of her existence and her relationship with her husband.