Table of Contents

Timeline Tennyson Family Tree Letter Images Acknowledgements Preface Introduction: Touching the Past Chapter One ‘When I receive your letters I feel that inward Joy unspeakable’: Mary Turner Tennyson’s Letters to her Mother, 1775 to 1804 Chapter Two ‘The tenderest and best of Husbands’: Mary Turner Tennyson and George Tennyson, 1775 to 1825 Chapter Three ‘Star of the North’: Elizabeth Tennyson Russell, 1776 to 1865 Chapter Four Mother and Sons: Mary Turner Tennyson, George Clayton Tennyson and Charles Tennyson, 1778 to 1825 Chapter Five ‘A delicate, pretty girl’: Frances Mary Hutton Tennyson, 1787 to 1878 Chapter Six ‘Your truly affectionate Old Aunt Bourne’: Mary Tennyson Bourne, 1777 to 1864 Conclusion: ‘The noble letters of the dead’ Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

Believing that biographers have overlooked their influence, this book focuses on Tennyson’s strong-minded female forebears, all prolific correspondents, whose unpublished letters cast a unique light on the Tennyson family and their times.

About the Author

Marion Sherwood is an independent scholar based in the UK. She completed a PhD on Tennyson with the Open University in 2011. Tennyson and the Fabrication of Englishness was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2013. She has also published articles in the Tennyson Research Bulletin and is a member of the Tennyson Society Executive Committee Rosalind Boyce is a retired librarian and indexer. She published Forever Young: Harold Tennyson RN, the Poet's Grandson, a Tennyson Society Occasional Paper in 2013, and has published articles on Lincolnshire local history. She is Assistant Honorary Secretary of the Tennyson Society and Honorary Secretary of its Publications Board.

Reviews

Letters and Lives of the Tennyson Women is the result of rigorous and painstaking scholarship. The editors prudently retain the period's variable spellings and grammar, and provide informative commentaries to connect the letters.
*The Times Literary Supplement*

A major contribution to Tennyson studies ... expanding what we know of the biographical influences upon Tennyson's work, whilst simultaneously allowing the poet's talented and resourceful female relations to speak for themselves.
*British Association of Victorian Studies*

This eagerly awaited book draws on the extensive archive of Tennyson family letters housed in the County Archives in Lincoln ... well-written and very readable, this book has a wider interest than simply for Tennysonian studies. The letters ... for the most part unpublished, cast a unique light of the Tennsyon family's interrelationships and the times and society in which they lived.
*The Tennyson Research Bulletin*

The fact that this book is so well grounded in unexplored primary material makes it highly original and will guarantee its value to those interested in the history of Lincolnshire or the life of Alfred Tennyson and his family.
*Lincolnshire Past and Present*