"Goody"

JANE WELSH CARLYLE--Townsend Scudder--Macmillan ($3.50).

Even misogynists have not claimed that Thomas Carlyle got the worst of it when he married gypsy-eyed, brilliant Jane Welsh. A wifely heroine to her contemporaries, Jane Carlyle is even more of a heroine to Biographer Scudder. Such admiration is partly understandable, however, for no modern wife would tolerate so much in a husband.

Perfect housekeeper, cheerful companion, admiring reader, pretty Jane Carlyle tenderly nursed her husband's rockbound dyspepsia with tasty food, his dyspeptic humors with tasty compliments, sparkled wittily for his friends, never complained of poverty or the isolation of dismal winters on the godforsaken farm at Craigenputtock, kept her mouth shut when he was talking, swallowed her humiliation when he spent his evenings with Lady Ashburton, took a back seat for 40 years, and in the end convinced Victorian contemporaries that the Carlyle marriage was a gruff idyl. Her reward was the affectionate petname "Goody," the company of famous men, her husband's fame.

With nice Victorian scruples, Biographer Scudder likewise calls it a happy marriage. Modern readers will likely be more interested in his unstressed evidence of Jane Carlyle's frustrations: her nervous headaches and insomnia, her refusal to write (although her good friend Dickens said she could outdo George Eliot), her declaration that "One writer is quite enough in a house." Nor can the reader so lightly dismiss as a weak-moment confession her confidential opinion that marriage is "extremely disagreeable."

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