Ambitious Heights - Writing, Friendship, Love – The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle

At the heart of this book, first published in 1990, is a friendship between two women: 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; writing for a market, and female fame; and the complex ambivalences between women.