In an essay comparing Jane Welsh Carlyle to her friend the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury, Virginia Woolf suggested of the former that ‘something of the narrowness and something of the prudery of a Scottish country doctor’s daughter clung to her’. (Woolf’s friend T. S. Eliot would make similarly snobbish and ignorant comments about the nonconformist culture into which D. H. Lawrence was born.) Jane Baillie Welsh was born on 14 July 1801, the only child of the leading general practitioner in Haddington, the ancient, neat and prosperous county town of East Lothian, seventeen miles east of Edinburgh: a family and an environment almost devoid of narrowness and prudery. John and Grace (both named Welsh, but unrelated) originated in Dumfriesshire in Scotland’s lowland west, as did Thomas Carlyle’s family, but their social standing was very different, Thomas being the son of a stonemason.