Emma Darwin: A Victorian Life (review)

"How few people know how to write a life," Emma Darwin lamented in 1889. She had developed a habit of sketching lightning appraisals of her current reading in letters to her daughter, and she had a low threshold of tolerance. One novel was "tedious," and the exaggerated horror of its hero "on discovering that he was illegitimate, after quite getting over the trifling discovery that his father had murdered his mother, . . . too absurd" (qtd. in Loy and Loy 333). Giuseppe Garibaldi's autobiography was "quite unreadable. The Italians think nothing too commonplace to say" (qtd. in Loy and Loy 334). The author of these frank critiques would doubtless be surprised to find herself the subject of a biography. But she might also be disappointed that her biographers have not sufficiently pondered the question of "how to write a life," have neglected to eliminate the commonplace, and have misjudged their hierarchies of significance to the point, at times, of absurdity.

Emma Darwin: A Victorian Life is the product of extensive, detailed research. James D. Loy and Kent M. Loy spent years on the project and "hundreds of hours" reading family letters in the Darwin Archives at Cambridge and the Wedgwood Archives at Keele University (371). They have missed nothing, though they faced a Herculean task in assembling the components together; sorting out the immensely complicated family tree of Darwins, Wedgwoods, and Allens; and converting fragments of evidence into coherent stories. If the requirements for a good biography were simply to find out everything that can be found about one's subject, note everything that interested her, and then assemble the whole in chronological order from birth to death, this would be a very good biography indeed. Everything you might ever want to know about Darwin is here: the names of distant relatives, their marriages, offspring, illnesses, and deaths; her own pregnancies, labours, holidays, shopping trips, domestic habits, and taste in interior decorating; her political interests, reading, friendships, and churchgoing; the wars and political upheavals of Britain and Europe that, however lightly, touched her life; her children, her pets, and, of course, her husband.

The life of Darwin could be a subject of absorbing interest. Charles Darwin's celebrity has ensured the survival of a rich treasury of sources in the form of letters, diaries, and memoirs, which might illuminate the inherent tension in the life of a woman whose love for her husband was at war with her Christian faith. I assumed that the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) would form the crux of this book, since Darwin's crisis of loyalty must have been particularly intense at this time. So I was disconcerted to find that the thirteen-page chapter titled "Midwiving the Origin" devotes just five pages to the book's preparation, publication, and critical reception. The remaining pages describe the sacking of a governess, the illness and recovery of a daughter, and a few speculative thoughts about Darwin's menopause, all of which occurred around this time and therefore are allowed to share the space. Darwin's reaction to the book is passed over in a line or two: she was "actually fairly comfortable with the Origin once it was a reality"; Charles's "evolution theory was something she could live without, but the man himself was not" (171). I had hoped for something more dramatic and of greater analytic substance.

It might be seen as a radical or at least a subversive move thus to play havoc with readers' expectations that the pattern of Darwin's life was defined by the key moments in her husband's public career. This biography portrays the proofing of the Origin as simply one more domestic chore among many; anxiety over its reception vied even at the time of its publication with day-to-day anxieties over recalcitrant employees and sick children. In women's lives as in men's, the public and the private bleed into each other...