Jane Welsh Carlyle (January 14, 1801 - April 21, 1866, née Jane Baillie Welsh in Haddington Scotland) was the wife of essayist Thomas Carlyle and has been cited as the reason for his fame and fortune. She was most notable as a letter-writer. In 1973, G.B. Tennyson described her as
She had been introduced to Carlyle by her tutor Edward Irving, with whom she came to have a mutual romantic (although not sexually intimate) attraction.
The couple married in 1826, but the marriage was quite unhappy. The letters between them have been published, and they show that the couple had an affection for one another that was marred by frequent quarrels. Samuel Butler once wrote: It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.
The Scottish philosopher David George Ritchie, a friend of the Carlyle family, published a volume of her letters in 1889 under the title The Early Letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle.