Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love : The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Carlyle

by Norma Clarke

At the heart of this book is a friendship between two Jane Carlyle, and the novelist Geraldine Jewsbury. It was a difficult friendship, and in its difficulty lies much that is illuminating about 19th century domestic ideology; about writing for a market, and female fame, and about the complex ambivalences between women and the constriants that shaped the support they were able to give each other. The author explores this friendship in the light of an earlier friendship of two professional writing women, that between Geraldine's sister, Maria Jane Jewsbury, and the enormously popular poet, Felicia Hemans. Successful in their own day, these two significant women writers have been almost lost to literary history. Their relationship in some ways provided Geraldine with a model for her friendship with Jane Carlyle. Examining aspects of these women's lives, writing, and relationships, exporing the crucial differences in their politics about men, Norma Clarke provides a subtle and illuminating discussion of the possibilities open to middle-class women in the Victorian age.

Genres: Biography

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1990

Reviews

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful study of four Victorian women, the bonds between them, and their lives as women and as writers. Mrs. Hemans was the best-loved female poet of her time, and her friendship with writer Maria Jewsbury provides an interesting counterpoint to the relationship between Jewsbury's sister Geraldine (a novelist and reviewer) and Jane Welsh Carlyle, wife of the famous Thomas Carlyle and an excellent writer (though of letters rather than of novels or histories) in her own right. Clarke examines their lives and writings and the bonds between them to produce a fascinating look at Victorian womanhood.

[Sherwood Smith]

In addition to being fascinating in its own right, she gives a glimpse of the mysterious Miss Mitford.