Ashton, Rosemary 1947–

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Ashton, Rosemary 1947–

PERSONAL: Born April 11, 1947, in Renfrewshire, Scotland; daughter of David (a teacher) and Doreen (a secretary) Thomson; married Gerard Ashton (a teacher), 1971; children: Benjamin, Kate, Thomas. Education: University of Aberdeen, M.A., 1969; Cambridge University, Ph.D., 1974. Politics: Labour.

ADDRESSES: Home—London, England. Office—University College London, Gower St., London WC1E 6BT, England. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: University College London, London, England, lecturer, 1974–86, reader, 1986–91, professor of English, 1991–2002, Quain Professor of English Language and Literature, 2002–. Examiner, lecturer, and writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Literary Review award, 1980, for The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860; Deutscher Akade-mischer Austauschdienst travel scholarship, 1983; British Academy Thank-Offering to Britain fellowship, 1984–85; British Academy Research readership, 1988–90; visiting fellowship to Beinecke Library, Yale University, 1989; Leverhulme Research Fellowship, 1995; British Academy Research Leave, 1999; awarded the Order of the British Empire, 1999; elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 1999; elected Fellow of the British Academy, 2000; elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, 2002.

WRITINGS:

The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought, 1800–1860, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1980.

George Eliot, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1983.

Little Germany: Exile and Asylum in Victorian England, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1986, published as Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1989.

(Editor and author of introduction) Mrs. Humphry Ward, Robert Elsmere, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1987.

The Mill on the Floss: A Natural History, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1990.

(Editor) Versatile Victorian: Selected Critical Writings of George Henry Lewes, Bristol Classical Press (Bristol, England), 1990.

G.H. Lewes: A Life, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1991.

(Editor) George Eliot, Selected Critical Writings, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1992.

(Editor) George Eliot, Silas Marner, Everyman's Library (New York, NY), 1993.

(Editor) George Eliot, Middlemarch, Penguin (New York, NY), 1994.

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography, B. Blackwell (Cambridge, MA), 1996.

George Eliot: A Life, Hamish Hamilton (London, England), 1996.

Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2002.

142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 2006.

Contributor to Makers of Nineteenth-Century Culture, edited by Justin Wintle, Routledge, 1982; author of the introductions to several novels, including Susan Ferrier's Marriage, Virago, 1986; editor of the German entries in Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Margaret Drabble, Oxford University Press, 1985; contributor of scholarly articles and reviews to periodicals, including London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Modern Language Review, and Review of English Studies; author and presenter of lectures on Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Dickens, Victorian marriage, the French Revolution, Romanticism, the Faust legend, radical publishing in Victorian London, and D.H. Lawrence, all broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981–2006.

SIDELIGHTS: As biographer of British literary figures George Henry Lewes, George Eliot, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rosemary Ashton has received plaudits from critics for the thoroughness of her research. Ashton appears to relish this pursuit; she described herself to CA as "a lover of the detective work involved in attempting to answer questions about a subject's background and his or her activities." Ashton considers her writing "a natural extension" of her work as a professor of English. "My interests are in intellectual history, particularly of the Romantic and Victorian periods, with special reference to the influence of German literature and philosophy on English culture," she told CA. "In recent years, I have found that my chief interest as a writer has been in literary biography. How people perceived themselves and were perceived by their contemporaries, and what can be added to those perceptions by an onlooker now, who may see patterns which were not available, or only dimly felt, by those living their lives, has a fascination for me." Ashton considers herself fortunate to live in London, which allows her to work "in the libraries (British Museum, London Library) in which such authors as Eliot, Lewes, and Karl Marx themselves worked, walking the streets they walked, and in some cases visiting the homes they lived in. To live in London and write the biography of nineteenth-century writers who also lived in London is to be able to blend one's own life with one's work in a uniquely satisfying way."

In G.H. Lewes: A Life, Ashton profiles a man who was best known as the longtime lover of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), but who also was an accomplished and versatile writer and editor. This very versatility—Lewes's output included journalism, drama, novels, and criticism, as well as philosophical, biographical, and scientific works—may have undermined his reputation, as Alice R. Kaminsky observed in Nineteenth-Century Literature: "Writers who shine in many areas but never become stars are the stepchildren of fame." Ashton's book, the first full-length biography of Lewes, offers her appraisal of his work as well as the facts of his life.

Ashton's biography provides evidence that Lewes was born out of wedlock. After his father's desertion, his mother's marriage to an army captain saved the family from poverty. Lewes apparently did not receive higher education, but he possessed what Ashton calls an "omnivorous intellectual appetite." His most successful writings include the Biographical History of Philosophy and a biography of Goethe; however, his novels and plays were not so well received. Lewes embraced a variety of liberal ideas and was a staunch supporter of Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. In 1841, at age twenty-four, Lewes married Agnes Jervis, who subsequently had an affair with one of his journalist colleagues, Thornton Hunt. Lewes legally accepted the children fathered by Hunt as his own, a fact that prevented him from divorcing Agnes. Lewes continued to provide financially for Agnes and the children after he and Eliot began living together in the 1850s. Lewes's relationship with Eliot went against the prevailing moral standards of Victorian England, but while they were subject to sharp criticism for a time, they eventually won social acceptance. Their loving, mutually supportive partnership endured twenty-five years, until Lewes's death in 1878.

Several reviewers praise Ashton's account of Lewes's life as thorough and evenhanded. Both Kaminsky and Richard Jones, in the American Scholar, called the biography "meticulously researched." Jones added that "Ashton's book is fair-minded and scrupulous if a little dense with quotation and cross-reference, and it fills in many details about Lewes's origin and early life that had not been known until now." Kaminsky pointed to Ashton's "reasonable, conservative approach" to biography, as laid out in the book's preface: "She will not attempt to hypothesize 'when nothing is known' but she will speculate if sufficient evidence exists." Modern Language Review contributor Robert Fraser, while deeming the volume "scrupulously researched," felt that "unanswered questions abound." Kaminsky granted that the book occasionally may have benefited from a bit more speculation but found this to be "ultimately a minor point." She concluded: "Ashton's book is a well-written, scholarly, undogmatic, sympathetic but not idolatrous study of Lewes. It deserves to be the definitive biography."

Having told Lewes's life story, Ashton tells Eliot's in George Eliot: A Life. Born in 1819 in the Midlands area of England, Eliot moved to London in 1851 and became editor of a radical journal, the Westminster Review, under her given name. She was a liberal thinker; she rejected Christianity and supported women's struggle for a larger role in the world. Westminster Review publisher John Chapman was her lover for a time, but her relationship with Lewes, whom she met in 1851, was undoubtedly the most important romantic attachment in her life. The relationship also affected her professional life: Lewes showed faith in her talent and urged her to write fiction, and under the name George Eliot she produced numerous successful novels, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch.

Eliot's literary reputation helped her find acceptance from the society that initially looked askance at her relationship with Lewes. After his death she married a much younger man, John Cross; Eliot died in 1880, just seven months after the marriage. Spectator critic Elizabeth Lowry, reviewing Ashton's biography of Eliot, noted that this marriage "is often cited as proof that she had grown tired of Lewes by the end of his life, but perhaps the truth was simply that by then she could not live without the affection which her happy life with him had encouraged her to expect."

Lowry further asserted that "Eliot's is a remarkable story, told by Ashton with sensitivity and flair." Isobel Armstrong, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, commented that Ashton's book shows Eliot to be a stronger woman and a more committed feminist than have other biographies. Details about Eliot's sexual and emotional life "reveal a powerful woman capable of making extraordinarily brave choices," Armstrong wrote.

According to William S. Peterson, writing in the New York Times Book Review, Ashton does not distort facts in portraying Eliot's feminism. Ashton pays close attention to the feminist ideals evident in Eliot's work, noted Peterson, but "she is compelled to acknowledge that a purely ideological reading of either the life or the fiction is unsatisfactory." He praised the biographer's understanding of Eliot and her era: "Ashton has a good sense of the intellectual and social context of Eliot's fiction and provides close analysis of the books as well as the details of her personal life. There is a great deal of patient detective work here; Ashton is a serious, persistent scholar, and the picture she gives of Eliot's intellectual and emotional life is convincing." An Economist reviewer took note of Ashton's incorporation of "acute, enlightening literary criticism into the story of Eliot's life" and pronounced the book one of the best biographies published in the 1990s.

The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography looks at one of the most significant literary figures of a slightly earlier era. Coleridge, born in 1772, helped start the Romantic movement in English literature. In 1798 he and William Wordsworth published Lyrical Ballads, which included Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." His life was not easy; it was marked by health problems, an opium habit, a loveless marriage, and a yearning and unfulfilled love for William Wordsworth's sister-in-law. Also, he could be a difficult man, noted Seamus Perry in a Times Literary Supplement review of the biography. "It is, as Ashton concedes, easy to be impatient with someone who combines 'a childish, neurotic need for the approval of others with a sharp consciousness of his own intellectual superiority;' but her own moral judgments are firm without being tiresomely censorious." Perry also praised Ashton's work as "full of telling incidental touches" but longed for more information on Coleridge's inner life. The book "is more a 'public' life than the history of a consciousness and since, notoriously, a good deal of Coleridge's time was spent within his own mind, this naturally constitutes a limitation." Spectator critic Jane Gardam, however, saw something positive in this approach. "Rosemary Ashton keeps her eye on Coleridge's work, his influences and influence, less on the 'sensational' life and the opium, and he would be comforted by this."

In Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage, Ashton describes the couple's relationship as "one of psychological and emotional tension," as well as an example of "astonishing literary, intellectual, and social success." Thomas Carlyle, who exercised great influence on other writers of his time, is little read now; Jane Welsh Carlyle's output consisted entirely of letters. Their marriage was troubled. Samuel Butler once expressed thanks that they had married each other, "and so make only two people miserable instead of four." Their writings, however, reflected not only their own marriage but also their intellectual and political worlds. More than 9,000 of their letters survive to document their lives, including their relationships with literary figures of the time, including Dickens, Eliot, Darwin, Emerson, Goethe, Ruskin, and Thackeray.

Benjamin Schwarz reviewed the volume in the Atlantic Monthly, writing: "Eschewing flabby generalization and unfounded speculation," Ashton "depicts and analyzes their partnership with precision, and also with fairness and detachment." Ashton writes of Jane Carlyle's annoyance at being considered a mere appendage to her self-centered genius husband, as well as his dalliance with Lady Ashburton in the 1850s, an environment which, no doubt, drove her to write to the extent she did. Spectator reviewer Philip Hensher wrote that Ashton's biography has "great style and panache. All your favorite stories about Carlyle's mildly comic sense of his own greatness are here, wittily and undemonstratively done."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Scholar, summer, 1993, Richard Jones, review of G.H. Lewes: A Life, p. 470.

Atlantic Monthly, July-August, 2003, Benjamin Schwarz, review of Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage, p. 125.

Contemporary Review, August, 2002, review of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, p. 128.

Economist, November 23, 1996, review of George Eliot: A Life, p. 103.

Free Inquiry, winter, 1998, James Herrick, review of George Eliot, p. 63.

Modern Language Review, April, 1993, Robert Fraser, review of G.H. Lewes, p. 419.

New York Times Book Review, July 27, 1997, William S. Peterson, review of George Eliot, p. 14.

Nineteenth-Century Literature, December, 1992, Alice R. Kaminsky, review of G.H. Lewes, p. 383.

Notes and Queries, March, 1997, John Gutteridge, review of The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Critical Biography, p. 128.

Publishers Weekly, March 24, 1997, review of George Eliot, p. 65.

Review of English Studies, May, 1994, Mark Wormald, review of G.H. Lewes, p. 271; February, 1998, W.J.B. Owen, review of The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 95.

Spectator, January 27, 1996, Jane Gardam, review of The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 32; November 16, 1996, Elizabeth Lowry, review of George Eliot, p. 55; January 26, 2002, Philip Hensher, review of Thomas and Jane Carlyle, p. 44.

Times Literary Supplement, March 15, 1996, Seamus Perry, review of The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 36; November 27, 1996, Isobel Armstrong, review of George Eliot, p. 25.

Victorian Studies, summer, 1993, Peter Allan Dale, review of G.H. Lewes, p. 495; summer, 1998, Suzanne Graver, review of George Eliot, p. 624.