PHILIP LARKIN wrote of Emily Tennyson, another poet's wife: Mrs Alfred Tennyson/Answered/begging letters/admiring letters/ insulting letters/enquiring letters/ business letters/and publishers' letters./She also/looked after his clothes/saw to his food and drink/ entertained visitors/protected him from gossip and criticism/And finally/(apart from running the household)/ Brought up and educated his children./While all this was going on/Mister Alfred Tennyson sat like a baby/Doing his poetic business.
There, in nineteen lines, Larkin wrote a fitting epitaph Emily Tennyson. I wish Ann Thwaite had emulated his brevity. The problem was all those letters that Emily wrote, augmented by an equal weight of personal mail, whole forests of epistles to family and friends, all of which survive.
Emily Tennyson was, indisputably, a remarkable woman in her dedication to her husband and his muse. She had great managerial ability and she adored him. From this biography he emerges as a ratheri dissipated figure, incompetent in the affairs of everyday life, who at the age of forty one realised that his comfort and security required a wife and so he married Emily.
It was a most romantic, if protracted, love story. Emily Sellwood, daughter of a prosperous provincial lawyer, fell in love with Alfred Tennyson, son of the local, quarrelsome, alcoholic rector, at the age of nine. They became engaged for a short time in her twenties, but Tennyson was not ready to settle down and his prospects (and indolence) did not satisfy Emily's father. When they finally married she was thirty seven years old, a woman of learning and considerable dutiful devotion to her ageing father, her sisters, cousins, aunts, and numerous friends.
During that time Alfred led a somewhat dissolute, though not greatly degenerate, life. In this book there is no mention of sexual improprieties, merely drinking and smoking a lot, and dossing with various friends and relatives. His financial status was always precarious, yet the couple set up house - within a short time of their marriage with a retinue of servants. Ann Thwaite does not say if Emily brought a dowry into the connubial home but one suspects that she did.
In the early years of their marriage the Tennysons rented rather large houses, had seven live in servants, and a huge number of visitors who not only ate large meals but often stayed as house guests for weeks. During this time, when Emily was pregnant, Alfred complained that she was not in a fit state to, protect him from "house bother" - what he called "the bore and bother of daily fretting", quarrelsome servants and, "all the letter writing".
Later she made up for this dereliction and managed their finances with great efficiency, acquired property, moved house several times, and protected Alfred from the irritations of life she considered proof reading as "work unfit for poets". "Emily was secretary, business, manager, steward, butler and wife, and she took enormous pleasure out of the exercise of, these managerial abilities however much they overstressed her and weakened her health. In later years, she made a plea for time to herself "for reading and thinking, to restore the elasticity of one's mind, now too like a bow spoilt by long bending".
Ann Thwaite had far too much epistolary material available to her for this biography. She also read with remarkable diligence other contemporary letters, biographies and articles, sources often yielding only a sentence here, a description there in this 700 page tome. The result is that the reader has to wade through reams of the boring minutiae of middle class Victorian daily life, descriptions of meals, clothes, accounts of trivial conversations, a welter of unnecessary information which heaps bushels on Emily's light. A more interesting and readable biography could have been written in one third the length.
Emily Tennyson was, indeed, a remarkable woman of her time. While there were other super dutiful wives, there were few who worked at what would now be regarded as a career. Most other women of her class led lives of decorative idleness or a regimen of visiting, entertainment and social intercourse. She worked, and justly deserves her place in the social history of literature her own ventures at writing were discovered only after her death.