The Greatest Biographer
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The publication of this book is a major event in the history of biography and a boon to every practicing biographer. Lytton Strachey is usually hailed as the progenitor of modern biography. But that honor belongs to J.A. Froude (1818-94). Not only did he break biography out of the insufferable bonds of Victorian reticence, he brought a narrative power to the genre that surpasses even that of what is generally regarded as the greatest biography in the English language: Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”
Whereas Boswell was a great dramatist, a master of dialogue, Froude was the virtuoso of the analytical monologue, tallying the significant events in his subject’s life in a supple prose, which Strachey himself revered. Indeed, it is hard to see how Strachey could have portrayed with psychological subtlety the dark, repressed side of Victorianism had not Froude offered him an inside look. Even now, no one has surpassed Froude’s account of a singular marriage, the fraught union of Thomas Carlyle and Jane Welsh. As Julia Markus points out, Froude had an innate understanding of women, one that he developed by becoming Jane’s confidant and not merely the disciple of Thomas Carlyle.
Indeed, after reading Ms. Markus’s stupendously fine biography, I have come to wonder whether biography is not, in fact, a feminine genre. It is women – and the feminine sensibility in certain men – that make a biographer attuned to what Boswell called “minute particulars.” Such things speak to the domestic economy of life that lights up the best passages of his “Life of Johnson,” such as the scene where Boswell visits Johnson in his chambers and describes the great man with hose around his ankles and a wig (too small for his head) askew.
When Thomas Carlyle, like Samuel Johnson, realized that after his death there would be many biographers vying to limn his life, he quickly settled on his disciple Froude as Boswell, giving him complete access to papers – including his wife’s frank letters – that Carlyle otherwise considered burning. Having visited the Carlyles on nearly a daily basis for many years, and in possession of an archive, Froude understood that for revealing what he knew, there would be no forgiveness. After Carlyle’s death in 1881, Froude edited Carlyle’s own “Reminiscences” (1881) and the “Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle” (1883), and wrote a four-volume biography (1882-84) of Carlyle. Froude’s exposure of the Carlyle marriage, especially of Carlyle’s violent nature, brought down the wrath of the Victorian establishment on the biographer’s head.
It was worse than that. As Ms. Markus shows, Froude’s life was ruined. Whole books were devoted solely to destroying him. Froude – no stranger to controversy since he had published a youthful novel attacking Oxford’s Church of England principles and been booted out (and disinherited) as a consequence – nevertheless was aghast at the attacks that persisted for decades and would continue long after his death.
Yet Froude did not tell all he knew about the Carlyles. Only in a posthumously published essay-length monograph, “My Relations With Carlyle” (1903), did he reveal that Carlyle was impotent and that the marriage had never been consummated. With that shocking disclosure, Froude’s biography of Carlyle and its unsparing exploration of the frustrations and furies the marriage endured suddenly redeemed itself in the minds of some modern readers – even inspiring the work of biographers such as Phyllis Rose in “Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages” (1983).
But impotence, Ms. Markus asserts, is not the half of it. She points to certain telling passages in Froude and in Jane Carlyle’s letters that suggest Carlyle was a wife-beater. Although Ms. Markus never uses such a blunt term, her meaning is clear – as is her excoriation of generations of biographers who have not been willing to confront the full story Froude felt compelled to tell.
But to dwell only on the Carlyle story is to shrink the importance of this book. Ms. Markus considers Froude “perhaps the greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century.” Her subtitle is taken from A.L. Rowse’s essay lamenting Froude’s obscurity. Ms. Markus considers Froude’s “History of England” (1856-70) a work of genius and his travel writing of nearly equal worth – not to mention his superb short biographies of John Bunyan and Benjamin Disraeli. A considerable novelist as well, Froude merits her aggrieved protest that nearly all of his work is out of print.
Why is this so? First, Froude himself wanted oblivion and did his best to destroy his papers. His life – early and late – was too painful to contemplate, even though in his last years he was restored to Oxford when he was appointed Regius professor of modern history, taking the place of his fiercest critic, E.A. Freeman. Second, the attacks on Froude fomented by Carlyle’s family and friends have to this day blunted a true appreciation of the greatest biography in the English language.
A third reason, though, is now the most relevant; Froude is simply not studied in the academy, where biography has a small role. English professors would rather teach second-rate novels than first-rate biographies. The very idea that biography is a genre worth studying is absent in the anthologies that dominate the discipline in college classrooms. The modern syllabus has no space for biography, no consciousness of the process by which great books and great authors are created. Instead, professors bemuse themselves with “theory” and treat texts as though they were liturgy. Texts for writing classes feature mostly essays by contemporaries thought to be “relevant” for students who are not deemed intelligent enough to accustom themselves to the discipline of history.
The irony is that Froude surpassed his master. Unlike Carlyle, Froude’s prose has not dated. As Ms. Markus observes, his writing is as fresh today as when he wrote it. Froude is not just the last undiscovered Victorian, he stands for a way of writing about the world that each generation ignores at its peril.