Because Jane Baillie Welsh Carlyle did not write for publication, she is most often remembered as the wife of the great Victorian Thomas Carlyle. Witty, liberated in her time, highly gifted, warm, intense, she might have smiled wryly at the idea of being recalled mainly as the wife of her famous husband, much as she loved and admired him--even in the dark later years of their marriage, when a combination of continued ill-health, on her part, and thoughtless fascination with Lord and Lady Ashburton and their set, on his, led to fits of depression and despair which caused her to destroy her journals and much of her other written work. Some writing does survive--most notably the incomparable expanded letter which forms an account of her visit to her native Haddington in 1849. Part diary, part confessional letter to her husband as the scenes of her childhood crowded in on...