A manager of genius

EMILY TENNYSON: The Poet's Wife by Ann Thwaite, Faber pounds 25

Just at the time when the visual image was becoming increasingly influential, Alfred Tennyson had the good fortune to look his part. His brooding, handsome and mildly shambolic appearance fulfilled expectations of a poet just as Emily Tennyson embodied the effacement, steadiness and devotion expected of an artist's wife. Looking gentle but anguished, she was repeatedly described as saintly, angelic or ethereal. She was also portrayed as a Victorian career invalid, caricatured by Virginia Woolf: "Emily jump? Emily jump? She has lain on her sofa for 50 years." Ann Thwaite opens her engaging biography with this parody before going on to show that the poet's wife was made of far sterner and more complicated stuff.

Emily Sellwood was born in 1813, the eldest daughter of a Lincolnshire lawyer. In a small society of extended families, the Sellwoods inevitably had professional and social contact with the Tennysons, who lived nearby. Far more is known about Alfred's richly gloomy youth than that of the industrious Emily, who was an accomplished linguist and musician, and managed her father's house from the age of 18. In documenting Emily's early years, Thwaite struggles to discern her presence among the more vivid characters around her.

Emily was devoted to Alfred from the age of 17, and later mythologised their first meeting. Tennyson himself dated their romance from six years later, 1836, when her sister Louisa married his brother Charles. Marrying the bridesmaid has a convenience about it that fits with the impression he gives of passivity in their courtship: "Thou didst make thyself wings of love and of faith ... and settled in my bosom. But how thou should'st have found thyself there, without those wings, I know not." Such an admission provokes sympathy for Emily, although Alfred's admiration for her determination is palpable.

Family difficulties meant that Alfred and Emily did not marry till 1850. The situation was compounded by Tennyson's inertia and self-doubt. As a later poem of his has it: "... 'tis from no want in her / It is my shyness, or my self-distrust, / Or something of wayward modern mind / Dissecting passion. Time will set me right." She was 37, he was 41, and that same year he became Poet Laureate and published In Memoriam. This was his monumental elegy to Arthur Hallam, who had been for Tennyson not only a model of brilliance and rectitude but had also acted as his agent and offered career advice.

Tennyson came into his marriage fully formed. He had already written what is arguably his most enduring and passionate work, not only In Memoriam but Mariana, Morte d'Arthur and The Lady of Shalott. His themes of impending consummation, disintegration and loss had found, in Hallam, an intense romantic focus with which Emily could not compete, but she could match Hallam as a professional support, and in the force of her enthusiasm and faith.

Ann Thwaite recalls the response of an American lifeguard at a hotel swimming pool with whom she discussed Emily Tennyson. "`Oh I see,' she said. `She was the poet's manager.'" Emily was indeed a modern-style manager: a combination of secretary, broker, nanny and PR consultant. Tennyson's poetry was big business, with his books selling in tens of thousands. Emily spent her days copying drafts, answering letters, checking proofs and negotiating contracts. She was also something of a spin-doctor, promoting the idea of cheap popular editions, casting around for suitable subjects and trying to suppress the poet's bouts of jingoistic excess.

We tend, now, to distrust such a vision of selflessness as Emily Tennyson. Even Thwaite, who is often protective of her subject, expresses exasperation when Emily's behaviour suggests a sense of duty run wild. Alfred was a poor correspondent so she replied instantly to letters from his family and friends, an appropriation that often troubled them. Worried that he had written nothing for their eldest son, Emily drafted something suitable herself. She had a forceful pragmatism that Tennyson must have found at times bracing and at others abrasive. She even organised his absences.

As he succumbed to the role of the people's poet, Tennyson's lyric promise was never fully realised. His articulation of inner disturbance through acute external detail and atmosphere depended on a kind of neurasthenia, the famous Tennyson "black blood". Many mourned the fact that Emily made him comfortable and safe, not least from necessary criticism. Thwaite quotes Harold Nicolson, from his otherwise astute biography of the poet, talking of Emily binding "with little worsted strands ... what was most wild in him and most original". Nicolson also admits that marriage brought Tennyson some badly needed peace. Should Emily really be castigated for that?

Other writers' wives - Frieda Lawrence, Fanny Stevenson and Nora Joyce - have been subjects of recent biographies. Vivid, liberating characters, they make Emily look oppressive and dull. Yet she was brought up to be an independent and enlightened thinker, and is hardly to blame for Tennyson's own timidity and his at times reactionary attitudes. She evolved radical ideas on a federal Europe and sent her ideas for old-age pensions to Gladstone, a family friend. She entertained everyone from Garibaldi to a Hawaiian queen, and instilled in her children an impressive sense of compassion and public duty.

Emily's involvement with her sons, the namesake Hallam and Lionel, again spilled over into an audacious helpfulness. Extraordinarily happy, at least in their early years, it seems that they did not find her behaviour excessive and matched her devotion. When Hallam sent her a copy of a student journal he had co-edited, she responded with a list of corrections and offered herself as proof-reader. More disturbingly, Hallam returned a proposed contribution to Lionel, suggesting that he let their mother look it over first.

The romance of the boys' childhood was perpetuated for as long as possible. Among the photographs that Thwaite includes we see them aged 11 and nine, still sporting long hair, lace collars and billowing smocks. Two years later they are shorn and, as Emily had it, "sadly spoilt by their ugly dress". The marginally wayward Lionel pursued a career in the India Office and died young of tropical fever; Hallam was to leave Cambridge in order to replace his ailing mother as his father's secretary.

Following Alfred's death in 1892, Emily and Hallam began immediate work on the Memoir of his life. Together, they destroyed a vast quantity of original papers. In her eighties, with four years left to her, Emily wrote a selective and revised version of her journal and drafted material for Hallam in his voice. Hallam equalled her in revisionist fervour and continued to amend the work after her death, curiously diminishing her presence in it. All this, sensitively documented by Ann Thwaite, shows that the culmination of Emily's careful arrangements of Tennyson's "Life" did not survive as she had planned it.

Like it or not, Tennyson is what Emily is famous for, and a large part of this book's interest lies in what it reveals about him. Ann Thwaite sticks to her subject and concerns herself mostly with his children, houses, mealtimes and holidays. She has little to say about his literary self. It is therefore a pleasure and a surprise to realise how many poetic insights can be gleaned from this approach.