More words of wisdom from Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. This is Volume 27.

“Intelligent, witty, thoroughly engaging . . . the most fascinating biography I have read in years.” —The Minneapolis Star Tribune She was one of the all-time great letter writers, according to Virginia Woolf, but as the wife of Victorian literary celebrity Thomas Carlyle, Jane Welsh Carlyle has been much overlooked. In this “hugely satisfying” new biography (The Spectator), Kathy Chamberlain brings Jane out of her husband’s shadow, focusing on Carlyle as a remarkable woman and writer in her own right. Caught between her own literary aspirations and Victorian society’s oppression of women, Jane Welsh Carlyle hoped to move beyond domestic life and become a respected published writer. As she and her husband moved in exclusive London literary circles, mingling with noted authors, poets, and European revolutionaries, Carlyle created and reported to her correspondents on her rich, rewarding life in her Chelsea home—until her husband’s infatuation with a wealthy, imposing aristocratic society hostess threw her life into chaos. Through dedicated research and unparalleled access to Jane Welsh Carlyle’s private correspondence, Chamberlain presents an elegant portrait of an extraordinary woman. “Sparkles with the wit and intelligence of the subject herself . . . If you think, as I originally did, that you have no particular interest in the life of Jane Carlyle, read this—you will be captivated.” —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lucy by the Sea “Compelling . . . illuminates the outwardly decorous but often inwardly tempestuous lives of Victorian women.” —The New Yorker “Chamberlain, Jane’s latest and incomparably best biographer . . . gives us, at last, a Jane Carlyle who seems thrillingly alive.” —Christian Science Monitor

Milton and Questions of History considers the contribution of several classic studies of Milton written by Canadians in the twentieth century. It contemplates whether these might be termed a coherent 'school' of Milton studies in Canada and it explores how these concerns might intervene in current critical and scholarly debates on Milton and, more broadly, on historicist criticism in its relationship to renewed interest in literary form. The volume opens with a selection of seminal articles by noted scholars including Northrop Frye, Hugh McCallum, Douglas Bush, Ernest Sirluck, and A.S.P. Woodhouse. Subsequent essays engage and contextualize these works while incorporating fresh intellectual concerns. The Introduction and Afterword frame the contents so that they constitute a dialogue between past and present critical studies of Milton by Canadian scholars.

Despite recent research, the 19th-century history of domestic service in empire and its wider implications is underexplored. This book sheds new light on servants and their masters in the British Empire, and in doing so offers new discourses on the colonial home, imperial society identities and colonial culture. Using a wide range of source material, from private papers to newspaper articles, official papers and court records, Dussart explores the strategic nature of the relationship, the connection between imperialism, domesticity and a master/servant paradigm that was deployed in different ways by varied actors often neglected in the historical record. Positioned outside the family but inside the private place of the home, 'the domestic servant' was often the foil against which 19th-century contemporaries worked out class, race and gender identities across metropole and colony, creating those places in the process. The role of domestic servants in empire thus lay not only in the labour they undertook, but also in the way the servant-master relationship constituted ground that helped other power relations to be imagined and contested. Dussart explores the domestic service relationship in 19th-century Britain and India, considering how ideas about servants and their masters and/or mistresses spanned imperial space, and shaped peoples and places within it.

Don't miss a single volume. Subscribe today! Back volumes are available for purchase. To ensure that you don't miss a single issue, subscribe to The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle today. For more information, click here. Volume 29 resumes themes begun in earlier letters: Thomas's flirtatious exchanges with Lady Ashburton, the recent death of his mother, the improvement of his soundproof room, and his struggle to pursue his research for Frederick the Great. Other notable items include Dickens's dedication of Hard Times to Thomas and Thomas's support of G. H. Lewes during the scandal over Lewes's affair with George Eliot. The highlight of the volume is a passionate and humorous letter by Jane, subtitled "Budget of a Femme Incomprise," in which she defends the rising cost of running their house.