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Clarke, Norma

Norma Clarke first wrote about Jane Carlyle in Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love. She went on to specialize in eighteenth-century literature, writ¬ing about the Bluestockings, other women writers and Oliver Goldsmith. Her most recent book is a family memoir, Not Speaking, to which she is currently writing a sequel.

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20241118122108 Norma Clarke on Jane Carlyle, SF Issue 84

I Too Am Here

Norma Clarke on the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle

I have a valued friend who lives a long way away and doesn’t do email or social media. We phone, occasionally, but once or twice a year I’ll sit down, choose a pen, assemble paper, pour a glass of wine, and spend the evening writing her a letter. It feels at once deeply self-indulgent and extravagantly generous. I write about myself but I’m thinking of her, knowing she will be pleased at being chosen. Jane Welsh Carlyle, a woman Sir Leslie Stephen described as ‘the most wonderful letter-writer in the English language’, put it simply: she liked ‘writing to people who like to hear from me’.

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