Consorting with Alfred

Emily Tennyson has, until the arrival of this excellent and compulsively readable new biography, languished in the margins of literary history. Languished literally, according to some: Virginia Woolf verbally consigned her to a couch for 50 years in her farce Freshwater, and others have portrayed her as something of an invalid, certainly self-effacing - Benjamin Jowett, who knew the family well, once remarked that she had scarcely enough "self-love to keep herself alive" - and always in the shadow of the Great Man. This aura of devoted servitude was exacerbated by the circumstances surrounding the compilation of the hagiographic Memoir by the Tennysons' eldest son, Hallam, immediately after his father's death. Or, to be more accurate, this Memoir was pieced together by Hallam and his mother, using the innumerable letters she and Alfred had exchanged when apart, the copious correspondence addressed to Hallam and his younger brother Lionel when they were away at school, and the regular journal which Emily kept for nearly 25 years and which she reduced and redrafted in order to aid Hallam. Much of this material found its way into the Memoir unattributed: this is particularly true of the long years before the Tennysons married, when Emily was far more involved with the family than the Memoir admits. Hallam played down Emily's role in Tennyson's life as much as he stifled acknowledgement of her voice.

Thwaite does a splendid job in piecing together these early years, something made all the more difficult by the fact that Hallam made a series of bonfires of much of the Tennyson material after Emily's death, very probably intending to wipe out references to family scandals - opium, alcohol, failed marriages and madness - rather than to obliterate records of the couple's intimacy. She traces, so far as she can, Emily's growing intimacy with the Tennyson family, but also examines the influences within her own, including the two strong, determined wives of her uncle, the explorer Sir John Franklin. Thwaite also stresses the habits of serious reading which she established early on: this was a woman who, when heavily pregnant with her first, still-born child, ordered Ruskin's Stones of Venice, Leigh Hunt's Autobiography as well as Howitt's Year Book for lighter reading. The couple's long engagement is demonstrably shown to have been due to a combination of family anxieties, including the far-from-successful marriage of Emily's sister Louisa to Tennyson's elder brother Charles. Emily's steadfast emotional commitment to Tennyson throughout the 1840s was the crucial rock on which their marriage was built. Above all, Thwaite shows how well Emily adjusted from loving a young and relatively impecunious man from a neighbouring village, to finding herself married to someone thought a worthy successor to Wordsworth.

Emily's involvement with her husband's work was in many ways a continuation of the role of his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. For years, Emily wrote a substantial proportion of Alfred's letters for him, copied out fair drafts of his poems and corrected proofs. She suggested topics for poems, and closely involved herself in supervising their French translations. Ally - as the poet was called, with unnerving familiarity, at home - depended on her judgement. "I am proud of her intellect," he wrote. Despite his acknowledgement of his wife's value to him, Tennyson cannot have been an easy man to have been married to, and Thwaite, although tactful, conveys well the fact that although he could be wonderfully charming, he could also growl, sulk, become indolent, and was prone to black moods. He was perpetually restless, somehow needing both privacy and the continual stimulus of people. He rarely remembered Emily's birthday and, on one occasion when he did, presented her with the peculiarly inappropriate gift of the opening lines of "Guinevere". Edward Lear thought that no one other than Emily could have managed to stick to such a marriage for more than a month.

But manage she did, to the point of exhaustion. Thwaite speculates, not without reason, that Emily may have been "constantly driven by a feeling that she needed to justify her position as the wife of the great poet". Many of Emily's energies were spent in running the household, and one of the many strengths of this book is its demonstration of the amount of active input which might be expected of any woman of a household where a good deal of entertaining was done. There seems to have been a constant stream of invited guests (not to mention the problem of uninvited, curious literary tourists). Emily's talents here as "a conversationalist, brilliant and stimulating" - to quote Theodore Watts-Duncan - would have been at a premium, but so would her organisational capacities. She was a compulsive list maker, whether of store cupboards or Tennyson's library. It was Emily who paid the bills and kept the accounts, who stocked wine cellars and linen cupboards, who organised and supervised builders at Farringford, their Isle of Wight home. Moreover, she saw her duty as an employer in social terms, regarding it a duty to engage as many people as one could afford, building a conservatory outside the servants' door, arranging treats and outings, taking financial care of their old age. Keeping the grubby, unkempt Tennyson neat and tidy was more of a challenge. The building of their second home, at Aldworth, and the migrations between the establishments, complicated domestic arrangements still further.

Yet not all Emily's life was spent serving others. She appears to have been a competent amateur musician, and set various of Tennyson's, and others', poems to music. Among the enormous amount of archival material which Thwaite has consulted, she found several unpublished short stories by her, apparently experimenting with personal feelings under the guise of fiction. And, probably under the influence of Christian socialism, she developed various practical political schemes for the care of the unemployed, the poor and the elderly, proposing to Gladstone something very like an old age pension scheme. She was a believer in beneficent colonisation, supporting the expansion of empire not for greed but to enable civilisation to be spread. Such spreading might take place at home as well as abroad: she pursued, unsuccessfully, the plan of publishing a penny edition of some of her husband's more popular poems. Moreover, she resented physical as well as mental passivity. Until walking and exercise became increasingly difficult for her (Thwaite surmises that her major problem might well have been a progressive, and of course unmentionable prolapse of the womb), she walked, played battledore and shuttlecock and even used Ally's chest expander.

The grasp of circumstantial detail in this, as in Thwaite's earlier biographies, is impressive, presenting not just Emily herself, but intertwining family dramas and tensions as compelling as a Trollope novel. Particular attention is given to the importance of Hallam and Lionel, which has the useful effect of deflecting attention from their father, enabling one to see co-ordinates other than marriage as crucial to Emily's sense of identity. She was closely involved in the early education of her boys, finding it hard to let go, as they grew older, entwining herself in the details of their lives - Thwaite delicately suggests that her maternal solicitude may well have spilt over into claustrophobic attention. The volume is well illustrated, too, with photographs, portrait reproductions, and with facsimiles of letters and sketches.

Inevitably, when there are gaps in the available evidence, a biographer has to be speculative. Thwaite is punctilious in letting one know where she operates on guesswork, but at the same time very suggestive when she raises the central question for which there is simply no evidence: did Emily, for all her devotion, at times feel neglected? It is suggested that her friends thought this, even if she refused to acknowledge anything beyond the fact that life could seem less stressful at home when the poet was not around. Lear, who frequently found himself feeling awkward in the face of the poet's more boorish or sexist behaviour, thought her overshadowed, restricted, her true worth unrecognised. Thwaite, however, ensures that Emily at last emerges as a woman notable in her own right, albeit one whose role was inevitably bound in with the life of her famous husband. The volume's subtitle, "The Poet's Wife", may describe how she has commonly been seen - indeed, how she might have chosen to see herself - but in the light of the book as a whole, the subordination it implies must surely be read with a certain degree of irony.

Kate Flint is reader in English language and literature, University of Oxford.